saw. You had the impression her wrists had steel in them and the curve of her thighs would be as hard as granite if you touched them.
Her face was pale and small and serious. Her lapis-lazuli eyes were alert and watchful. Plenty of girls have pretty faces and curves you can’t improve upon. You look them over, get ideas about them, and forget them as soon as they’re out of sight. But this girl you wouldn’t forget. Don’t ask me why. She had something. She was as different as gin is to water. And the difference, as you know, is there’s a kick in one of them. Veda Rux carried a kick like a mule.
As soon as I saw her I knew there was going to be trouble. If I’d had any sense I’d have quit there and then. I should have told Gorman I’d changed my mind, given him back his money and got out of this house like a bat out of hell. That would have been the sensible thing to have done. I should have known from the way this girl made me feel that from now on I was going to have only half my mind on my job. And when a guy gets that way he’s leaving himself wide open for a sucker punch. I knew it, and I didn’t even care.
“Hello,” I said. “I’ve heard about you. You walk in your sleep.”
She studied me thoughtfully. No welcome. No smile.
“I’ve heard about you, too,” she said.
That seemed to take care of that. There was a long blank pause while we looked at each other. She didn’t move. It was uncanny how still she could sit: not a blink to show she was alive. You couldn’t even see she was breathing.
“You know why I’m here?” I asked. “You know what I’m going to do?”
“Yes, I know that, too,” she said.
Well, that also took care of that. There didn’t seem much else to say. I looked down into the lily pond. I could see her reflection in the water. She looked good that way, too.
I had the idea I was having the same effect on her as she was having on me. I wasn’t sure, but I had a hunch I had touched off a spark in her, and it wouldn’t need a lot of work to fan it into a flame.
I’ve been around and I’ve known a lot of women in my time. They’ve given me a lot of fun and a lot of grief. Now women are funny animals. You never know where you are with them—they don’t often know where they are with themselves. It’s no good trying to find out what makes them tick. It just can’t be done. They have more moods than an army of cats have lives, and all you can hope for is to spot the mood you’re after when it turns up and step in quick. Hesitate, and you’re a dead duck, unless you’re one of those guys who likes a slow approach that might get you somewhere in a week or a month or even a year. But that’s not the way I like it. I like it quick and sudden: like a shot in the back.
I had come around the pool and was close to her now. She sat like a statue, her hands folded in her lap, and I could smell her perfume; nothing you could put a name to, but nice—heady and elusive.
And all of a sudden my heart was slamming against my ribs and my mouth was dry. I stood close behind her and waited. It was as if I’d got hold of a live wire in my hands and it was pulling me to pieces and I couldn’t let go. Then she turned her head slowly and raised her face. I caught her in my arms and my mouth covered hers. She was in the mood all right. Her mouth was half-open and hard against mine. I felt her breath at the back of my throat. Five seconds—long enough to find out how good she was, with her firm young other hand gripping my arm; then she pushed me away. She had steel in her wrists all right.
We looked at each other. The lapis-lazuli eyes were as unruffled and as impersonal as the lily pond.
“Do you usually work as fast as that?” she asked and touched her mouth gently with slim fingers.
There was a weight on my chest that made me breathless. When I spoke I had a croak in my voice a frog would have envied.
“It seemed the thing to do,” I said. “We might do it again sometime.”
She swung her legs over the wall and stood up. The top of her sleek dark head was a little above my shoulder. She stood very still and straight.
“We might,” she said and walked away. I watched her go. Her slim body was upright and graceful and she didn’t look back. I watched her until she had disappeared into the house, then I sat on the wall and lit a cigarette. My hands were as steady as an aspen leaf.
For the rest of the afternoon I stayed right there by the lily pond. Nothing happened. No one came near me. No one peeped at me from the windows. I had all the time in the world to think out what I was going to do that night, how I was going to evade the guards and the dog, how I was going to climb that wall without being seen, and how I was going to open the safe. But I didn’t think about any of that stuff. I thought about Veda Rux. I was still thinking about her when the sun dropped behind the tall pine trees and the shadows lengthened on the lawn. I was still thinking about her when Parker came out of the house and down to the pond.
I looked at him blankly because he had gone right out of my mind. It was as if he had never existed. That was the effect she had on me.
“You’d better come in now,” he said abruptly. “We’ll run through the final arrangements before we have supper. We want to get off about nine o’clock when the moon’s right.”
We went back into the house. There was no sign of her in the hall or the lounge where Gorman was waiting. I kept listening for sounds of her, but the house was as still and as quiet as a morgue.
“Dominic will carry the dagger,” Gorman said. “When you’re up on the wall he’ll hand it to you. Be careful with it. I don’t want the case scratched.”
Parker gave me a key which he said unlocked the back door. We went over the architect’s plan once more.
“I have another two hundred bucks coming to me before I go in there,” I reminded Gorman. “You can give it to me now if that’s okay with you.”
“Dominic will give it to you at the same time as he gives you the dagger,” Gorman said. “You’ve had too much of my money without working for it, Mr. Jackson. I want some action from you before I part with any more.”
I grinned. “Right, only I don’t go over the wall without it.”
I expected to see her at supper, but she wasn’t there. Halfway through the meal I found I just had to know where she was. I said casually I’d seen a girl in the garden and was that Miss Rux and wasn’t she coming in for a bite of food?
Parker turned a greenish white. His fists clenched until the knuckles seemed to be bursting out of his skin. He started to say something in a voice that was drowned in rage, but Gorman put in quickly, “Don’t excite yourself, Dominic.”
I didn’t like the look of Parker, and I pushed back my chair. He looked mad enough to take a sock at me. I don’t like a guy to sock me when I’m sitting down—even a clown like Parker.
“You’re hired to do a job, Jackson,” Parker said, leaning across the table and glaring at me. “Keep your damned nose out of what doesn’t concern you! Miss Rux doesn’t want anything to do with a cheap crook like you, and I’ll see her wishes are carried out. Don’t bring her name into this conversation!”
Because of what had happened out there by the pond, I didn’t play it the way I should.
“Don’t
