Figure it Out For Yourself

ONE hot June afternoon I was sitting in my office at peace with the world, and conscious that the world was, for a change, at peace with me, when Paula put her dark, lovely head around the door to shatter my pipe-dream.

'You have the Wingrove job to do,' she said.

There are times when I regret having thought up Universal Services. (No matter how tough the job: we'll do it.) As a money-maker it was sound enough, and as somebody else's brainwave it was brilliant, but when I get stuck with something like the Wingrove assignment, then I begin to wonder if I shouldn't have my head examined for putting myself out on such a limb.

The Wingrove assignment was a job I wouldn't have touched with an eighty-foot pole if I had been consulted, but it had sneaked into the office, together with a five-hundred-dollar retainer, when I was in bed with a hangover, and Paula had accepted the money and sent off a receipt.

The daughter of Martin Wingrove, one of Orchid City's most affluent citizens, had reverted to type, and he wanted me to persuade her to return home.

I hadn't much of a proposition to offer her. Wingrove was fat and old and nasty. He kept one of Ralph Bannister's taxi-dancers in a pent-house in Felman Street: a big, brassy blonde whose mode of life would have horrified a monkey. He was grasping, domineering and selfish. His wife had run away with his chauffeur, who was half her age, but hungry for money, and his son was sweating out a drug cure in a private home. Not much of a home background to persuade a girl to return to, but then I hadn't seen her. For all I knew, she was tarred with the same brush. It would be a lot easier for me if she was, and it seemed likely. From Paula's notes on the case, the girl was living with Jeff Barratt, a notoriously vicious playboy who was about as rotten as they come.

I had been offered a free hand. The girl was under age, and Wingrove was within his rights to force her to return home. But Barratt wasn't likely to part with her easily, and she was certain to resist. On the face of it, it looked as if I would be in for quite a time. Obviously, it was a job for the police, but Wingrove had a horror of that kind of publicity. He knew if the police fetched her back, the story would hit the headlines, so he did what so many people have done in the past when they have a particularly dirty job on their hands, he unloaded it on me.

I had been side-stepping the job for the past three days, and had begun to hope that Paula had forgotten about it I should have known better.

'Eh?' I opened one eye and looked at her reproachfully.

'The Wingrove job,' she said firmly, coming into the office.

I sat up.

'How many more times do I have to tell you I don't want that job? Send the money back, and say I'm too busy. '

'You're not suggesting we should refuse five hundred dollars, are you?'

'I don't want the job.'

'What's wrong with it?' she asked patiently. 'It won't take you more than an hour. Why, it would be tempting Providence not to do it.'

'If Providence can be tempted that easy, then I'll tempt it. Now, don't bother me. Get on to Wingrove and tell him we're far too busy to handle the job.'

'I sometimes wonder why we're in business at all,' Paula said acidly. 'I hope you realize there're bills to be paid at the end of the month. I hope you haven't forgotten this desk you insisted on having hasn't yet been paid for.'

I knew she'd go on in this vein all the afternoon if I didn't stop her.

'Well, all right. Send Kerman. Why shouldn't he do a little work for a change? Why should all the dirty jobs have my name on them? You'd think I didn't own this joint the way I'm treated. Give the job to Kerman.'

'He's teaching Miss Ritter to drive.'

'What, again! He's always teaching Miss Ritter to drive! What's the matter with her? No one can take two solid months, six hours a day, to learn to drive a car. There's no one alive who can be that dumb.'

'She thinks Kerman is cute,' Paula said, suppressing a smile. 'I guess it's a matter of taste, but she tells me to sit beside Kerman in a car is an experience all women should have once in a lifetime. I'm not sure if I know what she means. I hope I'm not being unkind, but I think she's neurotic. Anyway, what does it matter? She pays very well.'

'That's all you think about - money! So because Miss Ritter is neurotic and Kerman's cute, I have to do all the dirty work, is that it?'

'You can always engage another assistant,' Paula pointed out,

'Now who's throwing our profits away? Well, all right, but understand from tomorrow Kerman gets down to a job of work. I'll learn Miss Ritter to drive- If she thinks Kerman is an experience, she's in for a surprise.'

'The address is 247 Jefferson Avenue ...' Paula began.

'I know! Don't tell me again. When I die, and you cut me open, you'll find it engraved on my spleen. For the past five days, that's all I've heard.'

I grabbed up my hat and made for the door.

247 Jefferson Avenue was an apartment house at the Fairview end of the avenue: a big, square shaped concrete building with green shutters at the windows and a gaudy canopy over the main entrance.

The lobby of the apartment house was dim and soothing. There were no murals or statues or violent colours to give the homecoming drunks a fright. The carpet was laid over rubber blocks and gave under my feet as I crossed to the automatic elevator.

Hidden behind a screen of tropical palms in brass pots were the desk and switchboard. A girl with a telephone harness hitched to her chest was reading the funnies. She was cither too bored to bother or didn't hear me come in, for she didn't look up, and that's unusual in a joint like this. As a rule they head you off from the elevator until they have called whoever you're visiting to make sure you're wanted.

But as I slid back the elevator door, a man in a shabby dark suit and a bowler hat set straight and square on his head appeared from behind a pillar and plodded over to me.

'Going some place or just taking the ride for the hell of it?' he growled.

His face was round and fat, and covered with a web of fine veins. His eyes were deep-set and cold. His moustache hid a mouth that was probably thin and unpleasant. He looked what he was: a retired cop, supplementing his pension by bouncing the unwanteds.

'I'm making a call,' I said, and gave him a smile; but he 'didn't seem impressed by my charms.

'We like callers to check in at the desk. Who do you want to see?' He sounded no tougher than any other cop in Orchid City, but tough enough to have hair on his chest.

I didn't want Barratt to know I was about to call on him. It would be quite bad enough without him being on his guard. I took out my bill-fold and hoisted up a five-dollar bill. The fat bouncer's eyes fastened on it, and a tongue like the toe of on old boot searched amongst the jungle of his moustache. I pushed the bill at him.

Fat, nicotine-stained fingers closed over it: a reflex action born of years of experience.

'I'll just take the ride,' I said, and showed him more of my teeth: those capped in gold.

'Don't take too long about it,' he growled, 'and don't think this buys you anything. I just haven't seen you."

He plodded back to his pillar again, then paused to scowl at the girl behind the desk, who had stopped reading the funnies and was watching him with a set smile on her foxy little face. As I closed the elevator door he was on his way over to her, probably to share the swag.

I rode up to the fourth floor and walked down a long passage studded with doors. Barratt's apartment was No. 4BI5. I found it around the corner: an isolated door at the end of a dim culde-sac. The radio was blaring, and as I raised my hand to ring the bell, there came a sudden crash of breaking glass.

I dug my thumb into the bell push and waited. Strident jazz howled at me through the door panels, but no one bothered to answer the door. I sank my thumb into the bell-push again and leaned my weight against it. I could hear the bell ringing above the shrill notes of a clarinet. Then suddenly someone snapped off the radio and jerked open the door.

A tall, blond man in a scarlet dressing-room stood in the doorway, smiling at me. His lean, white face was handsome if you like the profile type. A moustache, the size of a well-fed caterpillar, graced his upper lip. The pupils of his amber-coloured eyes were as big as dimes.

'Hello,' he said in a low, drawling voice, 'was that you ringing?'

'If it wasn't me, then the place is haunted,' I said, watching him. From the look of his eyes, he was full of reefer smoke, and I had an idea he needed watching.

'I can be funny too,' he said mildly. His hand flashed up, and the broken bottle he had been concealing behind his back whizzed towards my face

I managed to get my face out of the way more by luck than judgment. The impetus of his lunge brought him forward very conveniently for the right-hand punch I hung on his jaw. The smack of bone against bone, and the click of his teeth made a satisfying sound in my ears.

He spread out on the floor, the bottle still clutched in his fingers. 1 paused long enough to take the bottle from him, and then edged into the room. The air smelt of whisky fumes and marijuana smoke: the kind of smell you would expect to run into in any hole occupied by a man like Barratt, Several broken bottles of whisky lay in a heap in the fireplace. The all-steelfurniture was scattered around the room as if two husky stevedores had been having a fight. The ten-foot polished-steel table lay on its side against a window that had a cracked pane.

Apart from the smell and the furniture, the room was empty. I moved silently over the bloodred carpet to a half-open door, and looked into a room that had the curtains drawn and the electric light on.

An ash-blonde girl lay on the bed. She had on a necklace of ivory beads, a thin gold chain around her left ankle, and nothing else. She was young and reasonably put together, but she didn't make a pretty picture as she lay on the crumpled sheet. Her mouth was puffed up as if someone had hit her recently, and there were several ugly-looking green-and-blue bruises on her arms and chest.

We looked at each other. She didn't move, nor did she seem surprised to see me. She gave me that silly, meaningless smile reefer-smokers hand out when they suspect they should be sociable, and the effort is too much for them.

She wasn't in any state to listen to a sales talk. I had to decide whether I should leave her there or take her home. Although her father wasn't anything a Boy Scout would want to hang on his totem pole, at least he wouldn't feed her hasheesh, I decided to take her home.

'Hello, Miss Wingrove. How about you and me going home?'

She didn't say anything. The smile remained fixed on the shiny red mouth. I doubted if she heard what I said, let alone understood what was happening.

I didn't like the idea of touching her, but it was pretty obvious she wasn't going to leave the apartment on her feet. She would have to be carried. I wondered what the bowler-hatted bouncer would say when he saw me manhandling her through the lobby.

There was another bed by the window. I stripped a blanket from it and dropped the blanket over the corrupt little body.

'Say so if you'd rather walk. If you don't feel up to it, I'll carry you.'

She stared blankly at me, her smile slipped, and she had to make a conscious effort to hitch it into place again. She hadn't any comments to make.

I bent over her and slid my hands under her knees and shoulders. As I lifted her she suddenly came alive. She grabbed me around the neck and flung herself back on to the bed, throwing me off balance so I fell on top of her. She was all arms and legs now, and I couldn't get away from her.

I didn't want to hurt her, but there was something pretty horrible in the way she was holding me, and I hated the feel of her hot, soft body. She was giggling in an insane way, and clung to me, her legs round my back and her finger-nails digging into my neck.

I seized her wrists and tried to break her hold, but she was surprisingly strong and I couldn't get enough leverage to free myself. We rolled off the bed on to the floor and she butted me with her head and tried to bite me in the face.

We wrestled around on the floor, knocking the furniture over, and after I had taken a couple of socks in the face that hurt I sank one into her midriff and winded her. She rolled away from me, gasping, and I got to my feet. I had lost my collar; one of my coot lapels had been ripped, and I was bleeding from a long scratch down the side of my face.

There was still plenty of fight left in her. She was squirming around on the floor, trying to get her breath back and trying to get at me when Barratt came into the room.