months ago, and I’d been banging my head against a stone wall ever since, until Gloria Townsend’s call. Now Gloria had changed her mind and I was back at my same old spot against the wall, only now the wall was harder.
The judge cleared his throat and sentenced Gloria Townsend to six months in the workhouse, then suspended sentence because the girl had no previous record. The policewoman nudged Gloria and said, “Well, you’re free.”
“Am I?”
“Yes, dearie.”
Gloria got up. She was a tall girl and carried herself well. The other plain clothes men sitting on the long wooden bench, waiting unhappily for their turns to testify against the other prostitutes who would parade through Women’s Court this morning, never took their eyes off her.
“I won’t be long,” Gloria Townsend said.
“You won’t be what?” the policewoman asked her. They came slowly toward where I was standing, between Harry Allerup and the police bench.
“Long,” said Gloria Townsend, and walked over to plain clothes man Allerup and smiled at him. Harry Allerup smiled back. It was a surprised and timid smile.
Gloria made a noise in her throat, her face worked convulsively and she spit in Allerup’s face.
The brawny policewoman grabbed Gloria’s arms and twisted them behind her until the girl winced. Allerup wiped his face with his display handkerchief as Gloria turned to look defiantly at the judge.
The judge glared at her. “There will be an additional thirty days for contempt of court.”
Gloria looked indifferent.
“Suspended,” said the judge bitterly, bleakly. The workhouse, women’s division, was overcrowded. The order was to get them back on the street, where they’d be better off than sharing overcrowded prison accommodations with the really bad ones. You couldn’t blame the prison officials.
The matron and Gloria Townsend went outside. I followed them into the corridor and hurried to make the elevator just as they got on. I stood in front of Gloria with my back to the door and looked at her steadily.
“I don’t have to talk to you,” she said.
“Why’d you change your mind?”
“Do I have to talk to him?” she asked the matron.
“No, dearie. You’re free. I’m only taking you downstairs to get your things.”
“What I can’t figure,” I said suddenly, getting close to Gloria Townsend and looking at her eyes while I spoke, “is why a high-class call girl like you takes up streetwalking in her spare time. Hobby?”
“Ah, what’s the use?” Gloria said. “You cops are all the same.” She said it with such depths of bitterness, even the impassive Negro elevator operator turned around and stared at her.
She turned away and faced a rear corner of the elevator. Her shoulders began to move, and by the time we reached the street floor her whole body was shaking with sobs.
The elevator door opened. A small crowd of people waited politely for us to get out before they got on. Nobody moved.
Then Gloria Townsend turned around and said very softly, “That son-of-a-bitch. That no-good, lying son-of-a-bitch.” She said it devoutly, almost as if she were praying.
“Who?” I asked “Allerup?”
She hit me on the face with her left hand. She was going to use her right hand too, but the matron picked that one off in the air and held it. They walked past me and out of the elevator. The matron gave me one of those looks only two-hundred-pound policewomen can give. Men, the look said, every one of you. It said a lot of other things, but they aren’t printable.
The crowd filing into the elevator tried to duplicate that look. They couldn’t, but it was still one hell of a way to start the morning.
chapter two
“WHY DON’T YOU get wise to yourself, Mike, and lay off?” District Attorney William P. (“Sunshine”) Sever asked me.
The nickname fitted him, for he was the original jolly fat man, when he wanted to be. All two hundred and fifty pounds of him. He could beam a smile at you like a ray of sunshine. He was a politician’s dream as a district attorney. A reasonably honest politician’s dream. Because Sunshine Sever was an honest D.A.—to a point—but also knew that politics did indeed make strange bed-fellows and that a D.A.’s job is basically political.
“Lay off?” I asked. “I sent for Allerup because I wanted to talk to him. What’s wrong with that?”
“I’ll tell you what’s wrong,” Sunshine said, depositing his big rump on a corner of my desk and hitching his belt up with oddly slender, almost dainty thumbs. “But it won’t do one hell of a bit of good, will it?”
“You haven’t told me yet,” I said,
“This city has a good Morals Division, Mike,” Sunshine said slowly. “I don’t have to tell you what kind of help it can be to this office. So far we’ve gotten along great with Lieutenant Spooner. Just great, Mike. I’d hate to see our relationship with the division loused up.”
“Who’s lousing it up? I don’t have anything against Lieutenant Spooner. I don’t even have anything against Harry Allerup. I only want to ask him a few questions. I’m going to, Sunshine.”
“Damn it, I know you are. But hell, Mike, use your head. Allerup testified in court, didn’t he? Are you going to tell me you don’t believe his sworn testimony?”
I got tired of arguing. A little coldly I said, “I’ll put it this way, Sunshine. Either I question Harry Allerup the way I want to, or I’ll toss the whole call-girl business back in your lap.”
“Now, Mike,” he said, his voice holding a mixture of reproachfulness and paternal pain. He didn’t like the choice, because he really didn’t have any. The Citizens’ Committee for Good Government and a runaway grand jury had dumped the call-girl problem in Sunshine’s ample lap originally when a call girl named Mona St. Clair had taken an overdose of sleeping pills and died. I’d taken it on as extra duty after Sunshine had practically gotten down on his knees and begged me.
“Listen,” I said. “Gloria Townsend phones and says she’s fed up with going on two-hundred-buck weekends with clammy-handed sugar daddies. She’s willing to tell everything she knows about the call-girl racket. Then what happens?”
“You already told me what happened,” Sunshine groaned.
“Allerup picks her up on a morals charge,” I said, ignoring him. “And she promptly forgets she ever spoke to me. Does it figure? After the trial she spits in his face and later, in the elevator, calls him a lying so-and-so. When I say, ‘Who? Allerup?’ she hauls off and slugs me. You figure it out, chief.”
“I don’t want to figure it out.”
“I’m saying she knows Allerup better than came out at her trial. I’m saying—”
“Mike,”
