Читать книгу Reno Rendezvous - Leslie Ford - Страница 6

“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 arm and held it in hers.

Then she turned around to the man behind her.

“Dex!” she cried. “You told me she didn’t get off the plane!”

Mr. Dexter Cromwell gave me one surprised look. Then his handsome face wrinkled in the most engaging mock despair.

“But Judy—you said your aunt! We saw this lady—but we thought she was just another customer, out for the cure. She doesn’t look like anybody’s aunt . . . not even yours, darling!”

He stepped forward and put out his hand with a frank charming smile. “How do you do, Mrs. Latham! You really don’t, you know—look like anybody’s aunt!”

“Well, I might feel flattered,” I said, “—if I hadn’t seen you so instantly engrossed with my fellow passenger.”

It was a perfectly horrid thing to say, I suppose, especially as I had heard Whitey say “Hey—where’s the old lady?” And in a sense it was rather flattering that it hadn’t occurred to any of them that I was she.

Dex Cromwell smiled again.

“Oh come, come, lady—let’s be friends!”

He looked at Kaye Gorman.

“Rescue me, Kaye! Tell them I didn’t even know you were coming out!”

The blonde girl gave him the most provokingly open smile.

“Darling—don’t tell me! I thought that was what you were there for, to meet me! That’s all I’ve been living on!”

She sipped her daiquiri, her baby blue eyes wide open above its frosted rim.

The color burned in hot dull patches under Judy’s brown cheeks.

I jumped as a voice spoke in my ear. The man called Whitey had got up and was standing by me. “Look what you started,” he said out of one side of his mouth. He turned to some nondescript young woman behind him. “If that ain’t the payoff!” he added. “Remember I said half-way back I wondered if the dame with the Park Avenue accent was the kid’s aunt?”

Somebody said, practically, “You’ll wind up behind the eight ball yourself, if you don’t keep out of this.”

It sounded sensible to me. I was beginning to wish I’d kept out. Judy’s strong brown fingers were gripping my arm like a vise. The thin edges of her perfect little nostrils were quivering.

“Let’s go upstairs, Grace,” she said quietly. She’d never, even when she was in pigtails, dignified me with an Aunt to my name. “So long—we’ll be seeing you.”

Whitey spoke suddenly as we turned to go. “Hey, take your antique, Judy. I guess that’s what you call it.”

Judy turned back. I looked around.

He handed her an odd-looking implement. It was a black rusty piece of wrought iron, about a foot long, that looked like a meat skewer except that at one end a hook was set in it alongside a small hollow cylinder that contained an old piece of candle dropping over the side. At the base of the short candle holder was a metal thumb piece.

“What’s that?” Kaye Gorman asked curiously.

Dex Cromwell took it. “It’s an old candle pick they used in the mines,” he said.

Whitey fingered the sharp pointed end. “They stuck it in the timbers,” he said. “Or they hung it up.”

He pointed to the hook behind the candle cylinder. “You get it up in Virginia City?”

Judy nodded.

“You could kill a guy with that, Judy.”

Judy nodded again.

“That’s what the man at Virginia City said—and he said it wouldn’t be the first time it had been used for that.”

She poked the end of it into her own flat little stomach and smiled, more like the Judy I knew, all of a sudden, than she had been before. “In fact, I’d rather thought of using it myself.”

Whitey grinned, looking at me. “I’ll bet,” he said.

Judy took my arm again. “Come along, darling,” she said. We went out. I was aware of a curious silence that we left behind us, and then, out of it, I heard Kaye Gorman . . . and with no possible hope that Judy wasn’t hearing her too. “Lord, no wonder Clem made her come out. I thought it was only his sanity he was afraid of, but God, it’s his life too!”

I felt Judy’s body stiffen, her hand tighten in a little spasm on my arm. Then she relaxed suddenly, with what seemed to me a rather woeful attempt at sang-froid.

“I’d especially like to use it on that woman,” she said.

She gripped my arm again. “Oh, I hate her, Grace—I hate her!”

“I know, angel,” I said. “But—”

She laughed. “I’m sorry! Don’t pay any attention to me, darling.”

We got out of the elevator. Judy unlocked the door of her apartment. She stood for a moment looking at the table, with a little oddly-bewildered look, as if something she had been dreading had escaped her. Then her eyes roved around the room.

“If you’re looking for that paper,” I said, throwing my hat on the sofa, “I put it in the waste basket.”

I looked at her. Her face was crumpled, suddenly, and I don’t know what happened to the space between us, for the next instant Judy Bonner was in my arms, crying as if her heart would break. She was also sitting on my hat, which I’d paid thirty-five dollars for in a mad moment in New York.

“I thought you’d seen it in Chicago, and hadn’t got off the plane, when they didn’t find you,” she sobbed miserably. “And here I’d been waiting for you to come, and she came instead! I . . . I just thought I couldn’t bear it!”

“Oh, lamb, don’t be stupid,” I said. I was practically weeping myself.

She sat up and dabbed at her eyes with a wadded handkerchief she fished out of her jodhpurs pocket, and sniffled.

Then she gave me a sort of miserable smile.

“If you do that in an alley in Reno, somebody tries to sell you dope,” she said. Then she smiled again. “I always say you can pick up useful information in the most unlikely places if you have an open mind.”

“So it seems,” I said. I was glad to be able to laugh at something. “I see by the papers you’ve gone in for gambling—I hope you don’t do dope too.”

“No,” she said. Her gray eyes lighted for an instant, and became grave again. “I keep strictly to minor vices. They say a lot of divorcées do go in for dope, but I doubt it, unless they did before they came. They clean the place up once in a while—but they do everywhere, don’t they?”

“They seem to,” I said.

“They say Whitey takes dope.”

She put her miner’s candle pick, which had been sticking uncomfortably into my ribs, on the table.

“But that’s one of the charming things about Reno—you can hear anything you like about anybody.”

She shrugged. “Maybe Whitey does take dope, but he’s been awfully decent to me. Of course you’ve got to watch him. He’ll take you for a ride every chance he gets, so don’t ever let him suggest a straight game of blackjack. He’s just naturally crooked, and as long as you remember that, he’s really a grand guy. He’d just cheat his grandmother out of her last cent, but then he’d turn around and give somebody else his last cent.”

“I see,” I said—not seeing, really. “And . . . your friend Mr. Cromwell?”

Judy’s clear brow clouded. “He’s all right,” she said quietly.

She went abruptly to the cocktail bar and poured out a stiff jolt of scotch. In the mirror I could see her face, unhappy and bitter again. She shot the glass half-full of soda, raised it to her lips, and put it down again without touching it.

“I don’t know why I do that,” she said abruptly. “I don’t like it.”

I tried to poke my hat back into shape.

“It’s universally regarded as one of the least successful ways of solving emotional problems, Mrs. Bonner,” I said. I got up. “I’m sorry, Judy. I didn’t realize he was such a . . . a sore point. But I’d just thought, in my old-fashioned way, that if he’s to be a member of the family shortly, I’d rather like to know—if not who his great-grandfather’s father was—at least where you met him. But think nothing of it, darling.”

I took my bag off the table.

“Are you dining with me, or have you got a date? I can manage beautifully. I’ve got a thousand letters to write.”

“You’re coming to the River House with us,” she said.

And just as I got to my door she came quickly after me.

“I’m sorry, Grace!” she whispered contritely, rubbing her nose against my shoulder. If you bring children up in stables, I suppose, you’ve got to expect them to act rather like horses. “I’m such a pig . . . and I don’t mean to be . . . not really!”

“Pigs are quite sensible people,” I said. “You aren’t acting like a pig, darling. You’re just being silly. But let’s skip it. I don’t want to know anything you don’t want to tell me.”

She went back to the table and stood, opening and closing the silver cigarette box.

“I’ve known Dex quite a while,” she said, in a dull little voice. “Before I came to Reno.”

She went on, not very steadily, and without raising her head.

“I . . . I said I’d marry him. Before I . . . left home.”

“That’s swell, then,” I said.

I was far from meaning it, but I was definitely glad, nevertheless, that she hadn’t just picked him up along the Boulevard of Broken Dreams . . . forgetting, for a little moment, that it’s a road that stretches on to infinity, only touching Reno as it passes.

I opened my door. “Does one dress?”

She looked up and laughed, her face suddenly alive and bright again.

“Only if you think you can get your man better if you haven’t got much on. Kaye Gorman’ll be dressed. I’m keeping these on.”