handed me my drink and waved me to a chair. Roxy enjoys luxury. The office walls are padded halfway to the ceiling with the same white leather as the chairs carry, and on one corner stretches a curved sofa that is part of the wall.
On one wall hangs a large oil painting of a nude man and woman. It’s Gulliver’s favorite picture. I’ve seen him sit in that chair and look at the picture for half an hour, pouring drinks into his belly, and at the end of that time a little smile will start and he’ll laugh his head off and then he won’t look at the picture for a while. I’ve never seen Roxy look at it.
“How did the Francis girl take it this afternoon?” Gulliver said.
I looked at him. His eyes were guileless.
“Pretty hard,” I said. “They were close, as people are in that part of town. She was hoping, all the time, that something could be done. She didn’t really believe it, but she was hoping.”
“She’s a fighter,” Gulliver said sympathetically. “Lot of backbone. Not like Jimmy.” He shook his head and sighed. “I always hate to see a good fighter beaten.”
Roxy drank silently behind his desk, watching us almost shyly. He takes his whiskey in a shot glass along with a larger glass of ice and soda, drinking some of the soda, then throwing a little whiskey on top of it.
Gulliver stretched happily, one hand on his belly, the belly with the deceptive slab of fat and the corded muscles underneath. He looked at the picture and his lips were full and heavy at the corners, his eyes a little restive. He drank slowly. Gulliver has a liquor stomach, lined with sponges. He can throw down better than a pint of whiskey and he won’t look drunk, if you don’t know what to look for. Then he’ll put the bottle down and fold his hands over his stomach and sleep for twenty-four hours, unless somebody sets him on fire. But he wasn’t drinking that fast tonight and I knew, the different sort of way he was looking at the picture, that tonight maybe it would be Alise, the big red-headed one who liked to go down fighting. Roxy was a good friend. He was big, maybe the biggest, in local politics. He owned six gin mills besides this place, the big tourist court and restaurant, and other odds and ends, like Alise. In an hour, maybe, Gulliver would feel the whiskey he was drinking so slowly now, feel it just right, and he would look at Roxy and Roxy would pick up the phone. Not that it was that kind of tourist court. It was just that Roxy was such a good friend.
And I had a feeling, looking at Gulliver, that I wanted to destroy the mood he was constructing, that I was going to anyway, because the good whiskey hadn’t rinsed the dead metal taste of fear from my mouth.
“You know, Bill,” Gulliver said, “I shouldn’t have said what I did this afternoon. About the Francis girl. I don’t blame you for maybe getting a little peeved. Forget what I said about Foundry Road. I’ll have one of the patrol cars drive by. Not much use in it, anyway. Kids are going to get their snatch, one way or another.”
He gave me that smile, so I would feel all warm and good and gee-Chief-you-mean-I’m-part-of-the-team-again?
“Thanks,” I said.
Gulliver got up and walked over to Roxy’s desk, helped himself to the whiskey. “Say, Bill, when was it that soldier came in?”
“The one who beefed about dropping three hundred bucks in that poker game at the Regal? Monday night, I think.”
“Yeah.” Gulliver looked at Roxy. “We’ve had some kickbacks lately, Roxy. Nothing serious. A couple of soldiers who dropped their rolls and wanted to start something. But if somebody from Fort McHale gets took in one of your games and goes to his C.O. I’m liable to hear from the Provost.”
“Some people are just unlucky at poker, Sam,” Roxy said. “You know that. If everybody won I’d be out of business.”
I couldn’t see his eyes where I was sitting, but I knew they were as bright and cold as morning sunlight on pond ice, despite his soft, almost whispering voice. A lot of people who thought they knew Roxy had never looked directly into those eyes. You could interpret Roxy a lot of different ways. I had my own ideas about him. So did Gulliver. He handled Roxy carefully. He had heard the story, too.
“Sure, I know,” Gulliver said. “It was just the usual sour grapes routine. But trouble could start. Maybe you ought to get in touch with your steerer down at the Fort. Bring him up here for a little talk. Make sure he’s more careful who he sends this way. Then if somebody drops a wad he won’t kick because he has sense enough to know it wasn’t his night.”
Roxy nodded. “I guess I’d better. Thanks for telling me, Sam.”
I had no taste for that kind of talk. It was part of the discontent I had felt for a long time, the arrangements Gulliver had, with Miller Starkey, with Roxy. I suppose there was nothing wrong with us taking advantage of Starkey’s discount. It was no secret in town. And there was nothing wrong with Roxy’s poker games in the hotel, although not so many people knew about that. Or the women outside the bus station and servicemen’s center, who dressed well and were discreet about it and you would never guess what they were. They paid by the month, to Gulliver, and had helped finance a new squad car. There was nothing really wrong, you could argue, because no money went into private pockets. But I felt the discontent, because the Starkey girls liked to drive fast, and some day there might be a wreck, and Starkey would remind Gulliver of the discount. And I remembered the look in Roxy’s eyes, as if he were seeing something a long way off, a bigger and better Roxy, and I remembered the story. I wondered if anybody could really handle Roxy, as Gulliver said he could.
“I had a talk with Miller Starkey downstairs,” I said.
Gulliver dropped clear cylinders of fresh ice into his new drink. “How’s the old man getting along?”
“All right, I guess. He wanted to talk about Jimmy Herne.”
“He would,” Gulliver said, tasting his drink, then adding a touch of sparkling.
“He said that Smithell called him the afternoon before he was murdered. Smithell told Starkey he was sending Jimmy Herne in next day to buy a suit. Jimmy had the money. He was going to learn responsibility by paying for it himself.”
Gulliver was about to say something, but didn’t. The mood had been as light and slender as fine blonde hair and I had snapped it. He was concentrating on recalling it but I knew he wouldn’t.
“He had thirty bucks to buy the suit with,” I said.
Gulliver went back to his chair. Roxy watched both of us as if he were peeking through a keyhole.
“Ah, let’s forget about Smithell and the kid, for God’s sake,” Gulliver said. “I put in a hard week’s work on that one. It’s finished. I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Jimmy had exactly thirty bucks in his pocket when he was picked up,” I said stubbornly, trying to make him see it.
It’s a funny thing about Gulliver. When he’s starting to burn, he tries to flex that stiff left wrist. The harder he tries, the madder he gets, because it only moves a quarter-inch in any direction. He was trying to flex it now, looking at it with shiny intent eyes.
“Now, listen, Bill. I don’t know why you keep talking after I told you to shut—to keep still. Roxy’s our host and I don”t want to bother him with police business. I’m telling you to forget it.”
Maybe
