face and red hair whom I’d seen playing the dime slot maching came in the door, and the next thing I knew Whitey was dancing with her. And the next thing he was bringing her over to my table.
“Mrs. Latham,” he said, beaming cheerfully, “I want you to meet Mrs. de Courcey.”
“How do you do!” Mrs. de Courcey said. She sat down.
“You’re Judy’s aunt, aren’t you. She’s a terribly nice girl. I can’t for the life of me see what she sees in Cromwell. All the Cromwells from the Protector down have been hounds. You must have lunch with me, my dear—I must tell you about Dexter Cromwell. I met him last year in the Islands. Tried to pretend I didn’t recognize him, here. It just shows nobody ever learns, especially a woman of my age. We must have lunch, my dear. So nice seeing somebody civilized in this hellhole. It’s simply awful—I adore it!—Oh, hello, Frenchy! I’d love to dance!”
I watched her go off. In a moment Joe and Judy came back. She looked tired and deflated, some way, as if she’d been going on her nerve and that was gone too.
“I’m going home, Grace,” she said. “Do you mind?”
“Go ahead, darling,” I said. “I’ll finish my dinner. I’m starving.”
“You can get back all right?”
“I’ll try,” I said. “It’s all of a block and a half, isn’t it?”
She bent down and gave me a quick kiss on the top of my head. “Good-bye, darling.”
I looked out at the dance floor. Dex Cromwell and the glamorous Kaye were nowhere in sight. And I’d finished my coffee before they showed again.
“Where’s Judy?” Dex asked. He seemed rather surprised, which convinced me he was stupider than he looked.
“I wouldn’t know,” I said.
“She’s taken Cowboy Joe,” Kaye Gorman said with her short laugh. “You’ll have to put up with me for the rest of the evening . . . darling.”
For an instant that was electric in intensity, their eyes met and held. Dex Cromwell shrugged his shoulders and laughed.
“My luck’s still holding, I guess,” he said lightly.
“I’ll see you later,” I said. “Good-night.”
As I went out the grilled door that reminded me of the speakeasy days, the hat check girl got up from a rounding deep-cushioned recess behind a little screen of palms and followed me out into the cool night. The door closed behind us before she spoke.
“You’ll probably think I’m drunk, Mrs. Latham,” she said, rather diffidently, which surprised me. “But I’m not—not very. Listen—you’ve got to keep Mrs. Bonner from being a damn fool.”
I looked at her. Even under the slightly magenta glow of the River House sign of palm trees with well—signifying an oasis in the desert, I suppose—she looked desperately unhappy. I doubt if she was a day over twenty-three, but she looked just then almost as old as time.
“He’s nothing but a first-class bastard,” she said, in a dull toneless voice. “She’s too decent to be chasing around with him. You got to stop her. She’ll do something she’ll be sorry for, first thing you know—and he’s not worth it!”
A sudden passionate intensity emphasized the last words.
I stood staring at her stupidly, trying to think of something to say that wouldn’t be disloyal to Judy, or too old-fashioned and naïve. I was saved the trouble. A couple of men coming out of Center Street spotted her, and she them.
“Hi, Vicki! How’s the girl!” one of them shouted. I heard her rippling silvery laugh against the clink of glasses and clack of chips as the grilled door opened, and the sudden silence as it closed behind them.
When I got to the Washoe virtually the same crowd was milling about. It appeared that in Reno nobody ever went to bed. Whitey, playing blackjack with the night clerk, disengaged himself for a moment. “Judy’s gone out to Truckee with Joe,” he said. I nodded and went on up to my room.
5
I must have gone to sleep the moment my head touched the pillow. Judy hadn’t been in her room, but I hadn’t expected she would be. The night was too clear and perfect to be closed in four small prosaic walls. Her car was gone from its place on the bridge over the river. I was glad she was with Cowboy Joe—with anybody, I thought as I turned off my light, but Kaye Gorman and Dex Cromwell and the gentleman known as Whitey.
The thought was still vaguely in my mind as I woke up. Without raising my head I could see the clock on the town hall across the Truckee beyond the River House, its hands dimly pointing to three. The light from the Riverside Hotel across the street went from yellow to rose to blue and back, lighting the night air half-a-dozen times before I realized that it was voices in the next room that had waked me. I didn’t in fact realize it until Judy spoke, her voice low and passionate and broken with tears.
“I’ll do as I please! You needn’t pretend you didn’t know she was coming here! You’re just trying to humiliate me—and I can’t bear it!”
I think I’ve never heard such poignant protest torn from any human throat. All the pent-up emotion of weeks was in it. The gallant little head was down . . . the storm they’d been goading her on to all afternoon had broken at last.
I heard the low tones of a man’s voice, and Judy again:
“Don’t you dare say you love me . . . when you know it’s her!”
I got out of bed and put on my dressing gown. Then I stopped. My first impulse had been to go in there—drawn by the real agony in those heartbroken sobs. But to go in, as I realized when I stopped to think, would only have made things worse. And it wouldn’t hurt her to quarrel with him, I thought—it would get it out of her system, at least—unless, of course, she woke up the whole hotel and got another notice in the gossip columns as a result.
I went to the desk and without a psychic twinge of any kind to warn me I did perhaps the most foolish thing I ever did in my life. I wrote a note saying, “Judy dear—If you two will stop this insane quarreling now, and resume at a more seasonable hour, you will please your devoted aunt who would very much like to get some sleep.” I then phoned for a bell boy, who came still in fancy dress at that ungodly hour, said “Will you kindly give this to Mrs. Bonner,” and went back to bed.
I couldn’t go to sleep, even though I heard Judy’s door slam and a long silence ensue. I lay there thinking, about Judy and Clem, and about Kaye Gorman. It didn’t make sense. Nobody who ever loved Judy could love that young woman with her bleached hair and the hard curve of her jaw from behind that melted into such a round baby face in front, and the blue eyes, wide and appealing when she wanted them to be and shrewd and cold as the devil when she wasn’t on guard. And Clem Bonner had loved Judy—I’d have staked my life on that.
I lay there for a long time; and then I reached for the phone without turning on the light, and called Clem Bonner’s apartment in New York. I’d tried to get in touch with him before I came out and hadn’t been able to, and it seemed to me that now it was still more imperative. He’d just be getting up. I waited. I didn’t quite know what I was going
