LITMIR.BIZ

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I went down to the lobby. My friend Steve Ewing was there already, with his arm around a girl in light blue shorts and dark glasses, helping her write a telegram. I slipped around something that looked like an old-fashioned tub of palms except that it had chromium bands and was painted Chinese red, and followed a neon arrow that said “Cocktail Lounge.”

      The noise would have been enough without the arrow, although as a matter of fact there weren’t a lot of people there. Most of it came from a three-piece orchestra of young men in blue jeans—Levi’s, I learned they’re called—with bright kerchiefs (which my young, brought up in the effete East, refer to as oatmeal-catchers) round their necks and wearing three more of the gaudy rayon shirts. They were on a triangular dais set in one corner of the big room. The bar, an elaborate affair of crystal and chromium and Chinese red, flanked them on the left, a battery of gaming tables on the right. The roulette wheel and the crap table were empty. An oldish man in ordinary clothes and a perfectly stunning girl, with curly blue-black hair and white skin, dressed in white riding breeches and black boots and a white satin shirt, were playing at the twenty-one table.

      Opposite the orchestra, along the wall on either side of the door where I was standing, were more slot machines than I’d ever seen before, anywhere, though not nearly as many as I was to see practically daily for the next few weeks. A middle-aged woman in an extraordinary outfit that was a combination of Pocahontas and the Girl of the Golden West was methodically stuffing dimes into one of them and pulling the lever without any apparent benefit to herself. She glanced at me as I came in.

      “Nobody but a damned fool,” she remarked calmly, “would waste his time on these machines.”

      She gave me a quick smile from a pair of shrewd merry blue eyes above a fine aquiline nose and brightly rouged lips. Her hair, cropped and waved, may have been auburn once and was certainly henna now, and her face, which must have been astonishingly lovely, was still very handsome, if a little stamped with a lifetime of determination. She was all in all—except possibly for the Western getup—rather the sort of person you’d expect to see entertaining a diplomat at the Sulgrave Club than pulling the handle of a slot machine in a hotel bar in Reno.

      She fished a five-dollar bill out of her bag and summoned the waiter. “Here, Eddie—get me some more dimes. I bet I’ve put a hundred dollars in these crooked machines of yours.”

      Eddie, bald and wrinkled yet oddly juvenile, like some very ancient little boy, grinned and trotted toward the bar, and I went on in . . . because, in a brief lull, I’d heard a voice that I’d come three thousand miles to hear. Just as I stepped in, I saw, in one of the mirrored columns that give the cocktail lounge at the Hotel Washoe an extent and crowded gaiety that it doesn’t have, a slim girl in riding clothes, with red-gold hair in a long loosely-waved bob around her sun-browned throat, rise suddenly from a crowd of people around a low table, in front of a curving red leather seat under the windows at the far end of the bar.

      A man’s voice said, “Aw’ sit down, Judy—what the hell!”

      I think I should have recognized it as the voice of the man they’d called Whitey at the airport even if I hadn’t seen him half rise and take the glass out of my niece’s hand.

      Another voice said, “Don’t go Eastern on us, Judy.”

      I saw Dex Cromwell pull himself elegantly to his feet and stand, looking down into her suddenly upturned face in a way that I suppose was intended to be humorous and masterful, at the same time. And it apparently was, for I saw Judy’s stiff little back suddenly crumple.

      “Oh, I’m sorry!” she said, with a short odd laugh that seemed so unlike the girl I knew that I was really disturbed.

      She picked up her cocktail glass and emptied it and set it down. Nobody had said anything for an instant. They were all watching her. As I came up I saw that Kaye Gorman was sitting there, watching her too, her eyes a curious cat-green in a face that otherwise was as near expressionless as a wax doll’s.

      Nobody had noticed me coming toward them. Not until I said, “Hello, Judy.”

      For an instant Judy Bonner’s lithe figure, taller and slimmer in trim brown jodhpurs than I’d remembered it, stiffened, perfectly taut. Then she whirled around, her face the oddest mixture of the most conflicting emotions . . . surprise, and hurt, and something else that I shouldn’t have noticed, I’m afraid, except for the way she blinked suddenly, fighting to keep back the tears.

      She didn’t say a word. She took one step to where I was standing and grabbed hold of my arm and held it in hers.

      Then she turned around to the man behind her.

      “Dex!” she cried. “You told me she didn’t get off the plane!”

      Mr. Dexter Cromwell gave me one surprised look. Then his handsome face wrinkled in the most engaging mock despair.

      “But Judy—you said your aunt! We saw this lady—but we thought she was just another customer, out for the cure. She doesn’t look like anybody’s aunt . . . not even yours, darling!”

      He stepped forward and put out his hand with a frank charming smile. “How do you do, Mrs. Latham! You really don’t, you know—look like anybody’s aunt!”

      “Well, I might feel flattered,” I said, “—if I hadn’t seen you so instantly engrossed with my fellow passenger.”

      It was a perfectly horrid thing to say, I suppose, especially as I had heard Whitey say “Hey—where’s the old lady?” And in a sense it was rather flattering that it hadn’t occurred to any of them that I was she.

      Dex Cromwell smiled again.

      “Oh come, come, lady—let’s be friends!”

      He looked at Kaye Gorman.

      “Rescue me, Kaye! Tell them I didn’t even know you were coming out!”

      The blonde girl gave him the most provokingly open smile.

      “Darling—don’t tell me! I thought that was what you were there for, to meet me! That’s all I’ve been living on!”

      She sipped her daiquiri, her baby blue eyes wide open above its frosted rim.

      The color burned in hot dull patches under Judy’s brown cheeks.

      I jumped as a voice spoke in my ear. The man called Whitey had got up and was standing by me. “Look what you started,” he said out of one side of his mouth. He turned to some nondescript young woman behind him. “If that ain’t the payoff!” he added. “Remember I said half-way back I wondered if the dame with the Park Avenue accent was the kid’s aunt?”

      Somebody said, practically, “You’ll wind up behind the eight ball yourself, if you don’t keep out of this.”

      It sounded sensible to me. I was beginning to wish I’d kept out. Judy’s strong brown fingers were gripping my arm like a vise. The thin edges of her perfect little nostrils were quivering.

      “Let’s go upstairs, Grace,” she said quietly. She’d never, even when she was in pigtails, dignified me with an Aunt to my name. “So long—we’ll be seeing you.”

      Whitey spoke suddenly as we turned to go. “Hey, take your antique, Judy. I guess that’s what you call it.”

      Judy turned back. I looked around.

      He handed her an odd-looking implement. It was a black rusty piece of wrought iron, about a foot long, that looked like a meat skewer except that at one end a hook was set in it alongside a small hollow cylinder that contained an old piece of candle dropping over the side. At the base of the short candle holder was a metal thumb piece.

      “What’s that?” Kaye Gorman asked curiously.

      Dex Cromwell took it. “It’s an old candle pick they used in the mines,” he said.

      Whitey fingered the sharp pointed end. “They stuck it in the timbers,” he said. “Or they hung it up.”

      He

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