Ladies of Chance

Chapter 20

Benton had more guts than sense. Pete had to go out twice to vomit before I gave up and admitted that Benton was a better man than I.

I sat down in a rickety chair and looked at him disgustedly. He lay on the rough board floor of the waterfront shack Pete had taken us to. His face was battered but his eyes were still defiant.

“What,” I asked him, “is all this getting you?”

He licked the blood off his upper lip and didn’t answer me. A swinging lantern above threw a shadow back and forth across his face. His knees were contortedly drawn up near his chest. The heavy sound of his breathing and the soft swish of waves outside were the only sounds.

Pete came in and closed the door behind him. He looked like the end of a bad night. Greenish-white around the gills. He gave me a sickly grin and didn’t look at Benton.

“Got the fishes all fed?”

He shuddered and lit a cigarette. Drew two puffs on it and threw it away as though it tasted bad. I picked up the butt and said:

“That’s one thing I haven’t tried yet. I’ve heard that between the toes is the tenderest place.” I squatted down and began unlacing one of Benton’s shoes. He kicked at me feebly and I sat on his legs.

Pete moved around in front of me. He said between his clenched teeth:

“Lay off, Ed. I can’t stand any more.”

“You can’t stand any more?” I laughed up at him, pulling off Benton’s shoe. “And you’ve been passing yourself off for a tough guy all these years.” I tossed Benton’s sock after his shoe and lifted the glowing butt Pete had thrown away.

Pete stiffened and said: “Goddamn it, Ed, I’m not going to let you do it. You’re crazy. You don’t know what you’re doing. You’ll regret this like hell tomorrow.”

I put the butt in my mouth and puffed on it to make it burn better. I took it out and spread Benton’s second and third toes apart.

Pete said: “No.”

I looked up at him with the cigarette poised. He was trembling. His fists were balled up at his side. Pete’s a big guy. Outweighs me at least forty pounds. And a hell-cat in a rough and tumble. I’d had him on my side in plenty of brawls. This was the first time he’d ever lined up against me.

I rocked back on my heels, still keeping enough weight on Benton to hold him steady.

“I haven’t told you what this is all about, have I?”

“You haven’t told me a goddamned thing. I haven’t asked any questions. But by all that’s good and holy, I can’t stand here and watch you torture that poor devil any more.”

“Does it mean any thing to you that he tried to kill me tonight? That he’s got information that may keep me from getting bumped tomorrow?”

Pete shook his head doggedly. “That doesn’t mean a damn to me, Ed. It wouldn’t to you except that your stubborn streak is aroused.”

“Are this guy’s toes more important than my life?”

Pete shrugged his shoulders. “You never set such a hell of a store by it before now. Why has living suddenly got so important to you?”

I got up and threw the cigarette butt across the room. Benton groaned and relaxed. Maybe I was glad Pete stopped me. After all was said and done, I was beginning to have a secret admiration for Benton. There must be some good in a man that refuses to squeal.

“What can I do with the guy?” I asked Pete. “He’s got to stay out of circulation for a day or two at least.”

“Leave him here,” Pete offered quickly. “No one comes here. I’ll send a man to guard him until you say the word.”

“Then let’s get going.” I turned away, glad enough to get out of the shack into the night air. Benton wasn’t in any shape to break loose and make his getaway.

Pete followed me to the car and drove me back to town. Neither of us said anything until I told him to let me off at a corner near Dolly’s apartment. He drummed on the steering wheel as I got out, and said suddenly:

“I hate to go back on a pal. But beating that guy up wasn’t in your line, Ed.”

I told him, “Okay,” and walked up the street to the building where I had first walked into things beginning with June Benton’s suicide.

It was two o’clock in the morning. A pimply boy was dozing in front of the switchboard. I waked him enough to put a call through to the Meade apartment. Dolly’s voice answered. She sounded quavery and frightened.

“This is Ed,” I told her. “Is Herman back in town yet?”

“Ed?”

“You know the one.”

“Of course.” A fluttery laugh. “Ed!”

“Are you alone?”

“Well... yes. But it’s terribly late for you to come up. Don’t you think...?”

“I’m on my way.” I hung up and went up the stairs with the boy picking at his pimples and watching me goggle-eyed.

I hadn’t seen Dolly since the Axelrod tea. Things had been moving along and I hadn’t needed her. She let me in with a fluttery furtiveness. She had on a bedraggled pink nightgown that clung tightly to her hips.

She turned her face away from me, but I kissed her mouth and patted her behind.

“You... I wish you wouldn’t,” she said hesitantly, pulled away from me and sucked in her lower lip.

I went across to a deep chair and sat down. “You haven’t got a very hot welcome for me.”

“Why should I have?” she flared out with a strange burst of anger. “I’ve had trouble enough from the last time you were here.”

“That so? What sort of trouble?”

“I guess you know well enough.” She was quivering inside her nightgown like a kootchie dancer.

“Don’t know a thing about it.”

“The hell you don’t.” She was actually venomous. “Who sent that reporter up here if it wasn’t you?”

I shook my head. “I’m not in the business of sending reporters anywhere. Just routine stuff, I suppose. The Benton suicide raised quite a stink.”

“Routine nothing.” She sat down ten feet from me. Her bare toes curled inward on the rug. Looking at them, I thought of the way Benton’s toes had curved when I spread them apart for the cigarette. “How did they know I knew anything about it?”

“I suppose you shot off your mouth too much. And you were one of June’s friends and her closest neighbor.”

“There was more to it than that. He asked all sorts of questions that only you could have told him to ask me.”

“What paper?”

“The Bugle.”

I didn’t bat an eye. “I didn’t have a damned thing to do with it,” I told her. “What the hell would I send a reporter to pump you for? You spilled your guts to me that night.”

She screwed up her face in a frown. “I could have stood the questions. But the reporter wouldn’t let poor Mr. Benton alone either. And he made Mr. Benton think that I knew a lot more about June’s trouble than I’d let on to him.”

“And Benton jumped you and you told him the whole story.”

She looked startled, her mouth hanging open and eyes bulging: “How do you know?”

“I don’t need a blueprint. When did you spill the dirt to him?”

“Day before yesterday. And he just went wild, Ed. Raved and swore something terrible. Called me everything awful and blamed everything on me.”

“And you handed him my name to get out from under?”

“He dragged it out of me.” Dolly began to get ready for a weep-fest. She pouted up her face and blinked her eyes. “And why shouldn’t I tell him? You were the one that got me into it. It was your fault all along. I wish to God you hadn’t come here that day. I wouldn’t have had anything to hide if you hadn’t come. He even accused me of murdering June when he found out she... did it in my bathroom.”

“So he found that out too? You certainly must have told all when you got started.”

“I couldn’t help it. That fool reporter had filled him up with hints that you must have told him.”

I said wearily: “You played merry hell when you blabbed.”

She was sobbing. She looked haggard and old. “I don’t care. I don’t give a goddamn. It’s good enough for you. It’s plenty good enough for you.”

“Would you be interested in knowing that Benton came to my room to kill me tonight?”

That jerked her up short. She forgot about the act she was putting on. Stopped sobbing and stared at me with her hand in front of her mouth. “What... what happened?”

“I slapped him down.”

“And he... where is he?”

“Where he won’t pull any more guns for awhile. If he’d killed me, you would have been a murderess, Dolly.”

“Not me! Oh God, no! Not me, Ed. I didn’t tell him anything that would have made him want to kill you.”

“You sent him to someone that set him on me.”

“Not me. It wasn’t my fault.”

“You were bragging about it a minute ago,” I reminded her. “Where did Benton go to get information about me?”

“I don’t know.” She had a handkerchief balled up in her hand. Her teeth were biting on it.

I got up and walked toward her. “Better start remembering.”

“I don’t... I won’t tell you.”

“I’ve had enough of people that think they’re not going to tell me things. I’m all through going soft for tonight.”

She shrank back from me. Put up her hands in front of her face. “I don’t know what you mean. I’ve told you everything I know.”

“Everything except the name of the person that sent Benton after me. Who was it?”

“Before God...”

“You don’t need to blaspheme. I’m going to find out... or wring your fat neck.”

She broke down and began blubbering. Every object in the room took on a faint tinge of red. I saw Dolly’s face beyond a red haze. I had taken a lot that night, and I wasn’t used to taking things.

I reached down and put my hands about her neck. Lifted her up with her squalling like a dying calf. My fingers on her windpipe shut off her voice. I held her in the air, then opened my fingers and let her drop to the floor. “This is your last chance to use your mouth for something besides bawling.”

She looked up at me and believed me. She whimpered: “I still don’t know what you’re talking about. But,” she hurried on as I bent over her with my hands clawed, “I know he got on the track of somebody else that he believed was going to be able to tell him things. I didn’t send him to her. I don’t know how he found her. I don’t even know whether she had anything to do with it or not. He was in to see me early this evening and was all excited and said he was going to get the real lowdown from this girl. He had a date with her then.”

“Who was she?”

“I tell you I don’t know her. A funny name. Cherry, I think he said. Something like that.”

She started to say something else but I walked out without waiting to hear it.