shrugged again.
“I go around, of course. A man can’t just sit in his room all day. But I’m fed up with the girls you see here. Bar flies—nothing but bar flies. I’d given up, absolutely, till I saw you get out of the elevator just now. Do you know, that one minute changed my whole life?”
I’m afraid I stared at him quite open-mouthed. He leaned closer over the pink terra cotta balustrade.
“You won’t mind, will you, if I can’t help feeling sorry for your husband, poor devil—and glad there’s no lucky man I’ve got to start hating before I’ve ever seen him?”
“Do be careful,” I said weakly. He was leaning at an alarming angle over the rail.
“My dear, I’ve already fallen so hard a few hundred feet wouldn’t make the least difference.”
If I’d ever thought that being a widow had taught me poise in such a situation, I was quite wrong. I simply stared at him. I had no way of realizing, of course, that this was a most harmless and naive example of how fast people work in Reno. They usually say it’s the altitude, and perhaps it is. I wouldn’t know.
“Would you like another drink?” Mr. Ewing said. He was looking at the glass in my hand.
“No, thanks,” I said hurriedly. “I’ve got to go unpack.”
“Then I’ll see you in the lobby in . . . shall we say, half an hour?”
He gave me what I imagine was intended for a seductive glance, and said, “Do you know, I’ve been looking for you all my life . . . and isn’t it strange I should find you in Reno, of all places?”
“It certainly is,” I said. I staggered back into Judy’s sitting room and sank down on the gray-and-rose sofa, and put my glass on the floor.
3
“You’ll like it when you get used to it,” the doorman in the fancy dress had said. All I could think of was that if this certainly very startling thing had happened to me at the advanced age of thirty-eight, what must Judy Bonner have walked into—being twenty-two, and beautiful, and rich, and heralded by half-a-dozen nationally read columnists? Was this Dex Cromwell, I wondered, in his satin shirt and white Stetson, just a superior Steve Ewing she’d met in some bar?
I glanced at the paper again, at the picture of Kaye Gorman—the smiling relict of a tobacco king, with all the rights, privileges and funds thereto pertaining. Where, I wondered, would she have known Dex Cromwell so well? His “Kaye, darling! You look like a million!” should really have been “a million and a third,” I thought suddenly . . . not knowing that in that thought the deadly virus of Reno had already infected me and that I was just running true to form on the inside of the track.
I picked up the paper and stuffed it into the waste basket, and put my glass on the bar. Then, without waiting to unpack, 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
