waiting for our order, Penny opened her large bag, drew out a filmy lace nightgown and neatly folded it under one of the pillows of the double bed. After she carried a toothbrush into the bathroom, her moving-in seemed to be complete.
When she came from the bathroom, she cocked her head to one side and examined me curiously.
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
“You’re an odd one, Mike Macauley. You haven’t even kissed me hello yet.”
Stepping toward her, I took her shoulders and looked down into her face. “Hello, Penny Coynes.”
She raised her lips as innocently as a teen-ager offering a good-night kiss to her date after the high-school prom. But when they touched mine, they became the lips of a woman. One instant they were cool and gentle, the next hot and demanding. Her arms went about my neck and her body strained against mine. She began to tremble as my hands drifted over her body.
A knock came at the door.
We broke reluctantly, her hands lightly sliding across each side of my face in a final caress as she moved away. Her eye pupils were enormously dilated and her soft lips slightly parted. It was no simulated professional act. There was genuine desire in her face.
Wiping lipstick from my mouth with a handkerchief, I opened the door to admit the room-service waiter. He carried in his tray, set the two highballs on the dresser and handed me the tab. I overtipped him and got him out again.
When the door closed, Penny and I looked at each other. There was a waiting expression on her face. There may have been one on mine too, but I suppressed it. I had brought her up here to learn something about the call-girl racket, and business came before pleasure.
“Better not let the ice melt,” I said, lifting one of the drinks and handing it to her.
She looked a little disappointed, but she accepted the drink. I raised mine, said, “Bumps,” and we both sipped.
“You mentioned Gloria Townsend before,” I said. “Know her well?”
Her expression became a little wary. “Pretty well. She was one of the girls.”
“Was? She isn’t dead.”
She studied the ice in her highball. “No. But close to it. I don’t imagine she’ll come back to work if she recovers.”
“She’d be a fool if she did,” I said. “You know who beat her up, don’t you?”
She gave me a frightened look. “Do you?”
“Not by name. But it was someone in the organization you work for. To keep her from talking to me.”
Her expression relaxed at the news that I didn’t know the actual assailant. “Tupper Smith has a different theory.”
“The farmer whose place you girls use for a headquarters? He would have, since it was probably on his order that Gloria was beaten. What’s his story?”
“He thinks Gloria’s brother beat her because he found out she was a call girl. Sid Trask.”
“She has a brother named Trask?”
Penny nodded. “That’s her real name too. Gladys Trask. Sid’s the yard manager at Sullivan’s Lumber Company. He’s a huge man and has a violent temper. He’d be quite capable of beating her if he found out what she was doing.”
I snorted. “The girl was going to give me some inside dope on the racket. The beating stopped her. It would be pretty coincidental if an outraged brother came along just in time to get Tupper Smith and his cohorts off the hook.”
Penny drained her glass, set it down on the dresser and said, “You didn’t really make this date to let your hair down, did you? You just want to pump me. Would you like to see me beaten like Gloria?”
The minute she made the remark, she wished she hadn’t. She looked at me in consternation.
“So you know the real reason she was beaten,” I said softly. “Didn’t it scare you a little to see what happens to girls who want to quit? Won’t you want to quit some day, Penny?”
The, question jolted her. You could tell by her suddenly pinched and withdrawn expression that it was one she had skirted because she was afraid to face it.
“Let’s change the subject, Mike. If you just want to pump me, I’ll give you your money back and go home.”
I set down my glass. “Come here,” I ordered.
She came to me obediently, standing before me like a little girl, with averted eyes. I took her shoulders and drew her into my arms. Her lips raised, but it wasn’t like before. She was unresisting, but without passion.
After a moment I raised my head and looked down into her upturned face. She waited, her eyes closed and her expression remote.
“It’s no good, is it, Penny?” I asked quietly.
Her eyes opened. “Why, Mike?”
“Because before you wanted me. Now you’re just offering what’s paid for. And I think I like you too much to buy you.”
She gazed at me steadily, her lips barely parted. “Do you, Mike? You mean you’d only want me if it wasn’t a business arrangement?”
“That’s about the size of it, Penny.”
“But you would want me then?”
“Who wouldn’t?” I said a little bitterly. “You’re a lovely girl.”
Disengaging herself from my arms, she picked up her conical bag and drew out the two hundred dollars. Separating one of the fifties, she returned it to the bag and laid the other three on the dresser.
“Tupper Smith’s cut for the referral is fifty,” she said. “Now there’s no profit in it for me.”
I shook my head wonderingly. “For a call girl you’re the poorest businesswoman I ever heard of. Stop trying to give me my money back every few minutes. You’ve kept your part of the bargain. It’s my loss if I don’t want to take advantage of it.”
She watched me quietly, looking a little lost, as I picked up the bills and dropped them back in the bag.
“I said, “What’s your real name, Penny?”
“It’s Coynes. The Penny is faked, but the last name is right. Peggy Coynes.”
“Then next time I’ll take you out as Peggy Coynes the dress model, instead of as Penny Coynes the call girl. I think we’d both like it better.”
She went over to the bed, drew the filmy nightgown from beneath the pillow, went to the bathroom and returned with her toothbrush. She stowed both sway in her bag without looking at me. She started for the door, stopped with her hand on the knob and suddenly turned and ran to me.
“Mike,” she said, “be careful. Be awfully careful.”
She
