“I’LL GIVE YOU A STORY!”
To say that Derek Wingblade’s face fell, was to say little.
Here he had thought his disguise was perfect—his lingo the same—and his “proof of identity” 101 per cent convincing. And this girl—cheap doorway hustler as she was!—had seen right through it. Still worse, seen past it—to himself! Unexplainable, that.
But he endeavored to bluff it through.
“Wat,” he expostulated, “you meen by thaz name Dear-ak—Weeng-blad? Wat—”
“Cut it, Wingblade!” she said. Though not with the vindictiveness she had used when she had thought him a policeman. And from the bureau drawer she yanked what had evidently been the paper lining thereof, and which proved to be a rotogravure section. At which his face fell. For he knew the rest. She thrust it toward him. Where his own picture stared him in the face. And the caption under it which read:
DEREK WINGBLADE
of the famous Wingblade-Highsmith family of New York, who was one of the 40 heirs of the wealthy and somewhat eccentric Mrs. Sophronia Highsmith who left every one of her kith and kin one sentimental bequest—and one valuable bequest! It is reported that Wingblade, seeking to make something of himself, is endeavoring to obtain a journalistic connection, but has thus far been unsuccessful.
“You win!” he said, helplessly. “I can’t buck my own advance publicity. Member of a famous family—heir to an eccentric wealthy woman—would-be newspaperman—hell!”
She was, plainly, vastly amused. “Well, what d’ya expect, anyway? A guy like you—trying to take off an ignorant Mex? Supposing, now, I’d claimed to you to be her—” She tossed a thumb over her shoulder, toward the wall back of the half-width bed, where a cheap chromo of the Virgin Mary hung with a single thumbtack, next a brassy loudly ticking alarm clock whose hands, right now, stood at 5 minutes to 8. “—would I get away with it? Nit! At least, you got by successfully until you came in here and stood under the light. And at that moment I knew I’d seen you a dozen times—instead of just once. But where? And when my glims ran down to your mitts—and I saw they were a definite shade darker than your face—I was certain. And right then and there it hit me: ’twas every time I pulled my bureau drawer open that I saw you. But hellfire, Wingblade, sit down. And I’ll mix us a couple of drinks. From the bar there!” She indicated apparently the square table. “Though they’ll be minus ice. What’ll yours be?”
He turned, and saw that a ledge had been built underneath the table and in, on which a congeries of bottles stood. Together with two cocktail glasses with badly chipped edges. He saw a typical 5th of vermouth. He saw whisky. He saw one or two other kinds of liquors. Though not much liquor in any one bottle. He saw little bottles, too, of medicine or cosmetics. And knew that, womanlike, she cluttered her “bar” with everything else in Christendom.
“Well,” he said cheerfully, “so far as ice goes—I don’t like my drinks cold anyway. And make mine a Manhattan cocktail—except without the vermouth. If, that is, your bar there has bitters and sugar-syrup?” He had tossed his dollar-studded hat onto the bed—not much of a toss, in such a small room—he could almost have extended it there—and now he looked at his hands. “Well—so long as the old disguise is busted sky-high, d’ya mind if I wash this damfool stain off these mitts of mine? Twas a mistake to put it on—and it feels downright sticky.”
“Not at all,” she said. She was drawing down the shade of the one window clear to the sill. “There be the washbowl—on yonder side the table!”
He rounded the table, as she dropped down in the chair fronting the ledgelike bar, and in but four steps or so approached the washbowl. He put in the chain-attached plug, and ran the water in from both faucets. Both ran cold. As would be expected in a place like this! But ’twould wash. Especially when aided by the cake of lurid pink soap on the bowl, which smelled of cheap scent even before it got moistened. And the washing was the most important thing.
He tucked in the cuffs of his Mexican jacket.
“Axcoos’, pliz,” he said facetiously, grinning back at her over his shoulder, “my back?”
She was busily mixing a couple of drinks, glass in one hand. “It’s a good-looking back anyway,” she said. “Looks like it’s played some football in its day?”
“It has,” he said sadly. Reaching with his right hand for the high-smelling soap.
It felt good—one full minute later—when that stain was completely removed from his hands and wrists. Lucky he’d not put it on his face and neck! And now he turned to the girl again. This time, the plug of the bowl in his dripping hand. She was sitting back, the pack of cards disposed of somewhere, two drinks laid out—waiting. He noted the drinks were of markedly different color.
“Just what,” he asked helplessly, “d’ya do when the dirty, soapy, pink-colored water from your own ablutions sticks tight where ’tis—and refuses to go down?”
“You pray,” she snickered, “or you cuss! At least in any jernt like this—where the plumbing cert’ny musta been got at the time Noah’s Ark was dismantled. But, if you can’t pray—and are too lazy to cuss, you—” She sprang up, and came over to where he stood—and stood embarrassedly. For it was embarrassing to have one’s own ablutionary water stick around in company! She surveyed the half-bowlful of pink-tinged, amber-stained soapfroth-covered water. “It’ll go down inside of a half-hour. Though I’m glad it’s backed up. For it’ll give me a grand excuse, a little while later after you’ve settled yourself, to send for Sour-Puss—that’s the landlady—and her force-pump. I want her to see you, if you don’t mind. Here—” She handed him a small lace-edged towel that had hung on a hook. “Dry the old mitts—and let’s drink up.”
He proceeded with the drying of his hands, replying to her at the same time.
“Well, this—now—Madame Sour-Puss—won’t she give me a grand chase-out? You—entertaining a ‘gemmun friend’—in your room?”
She looked at him in amazement. “Sa-a-ay—how do you ’spose Sour-puss gets her rentals in around here? By renting rooms to virgins and sweet girl graduates? She—well the fact is that when I rented this room yesterday, she asked me if I had a reg’ler gemmun friend so’s her room rent would be ‘guaranteed’—and I swore I had. A handsome ‘furriner’! So—you’re him!”
“I see,” he laughed. “Well, I hope her eyesight is good only enough to use her force-pump. For she’s the one, I take it, who lined that drawer with that roto section—and she may remember this phiz of mine too. And if she finds your alleged boy-friend is a phony Mexican—you may get the chase-out as well as me, yes, no?”
She only grinned.
He had finished drying his hands by now, and handed her back the towel, unleashing the cuffs of his jacket, and buttoning it together as she restored the towel to its hanging place.
Then he repaired to the chair whose back was to him.
Almost as quickly as it took him to do this, she had rounded the table, and was dropping down into her chair.
Atop, in fact, her evening paper which she had allowed to remain on the seat thereof, no doubt as a semi-cushion against the hard wood.
He was gazing, however, at the two cocktail glasses. Full to overbrimming. And laid out, one to each place.
“Hey—hey,” he expostulated, “your drink is different than mine. How come?”
“Why, sure,” she said coolly. “Mine’s got vermouth in it. But no bitters. While yours’s got bitters. And no vermouth. Wasn’t that what you said?”
“Right. Okay!” He twirled his glass gently on its base, without spilling a drop. “Just one of these potations constitutes an evening’s tippling for me, when on the job—so the question right now—before I wrap myself around it—is whether I’m to drink it in celebration of getting—rather, having got!—the story I started out after tonight?”
“It all depends,” she said, gently twirling her own glass in like manner, “what your story is?”
“Well,” he said, “I will come clean with you. To begin with, I am not—in case any doubts have since entered your mind—the double of the man you named. I’m he, himself—Derek Wingblade—”
“A rich man,” she said gently, and firmly.
“No,” he returned. “Not. Really! Even if I am down as an inheritor from Sophronia Highsmith. I’m of a branch of the family that went beautifully bust ’way back—and has been that way ever since. All our branch has is expensive tastes—the knowledge of the best vintages of champagne—and of who sung what in the opera far back—and that sort of thing. I’ve had a genteel desk for years in a stock-and-bond house, vouchsafed me by the president who knew Dad—and which has kept food in me, and my ties pressed—and all that. But I decided, seven weeks or so ago, when the firm went out of business, to go to work—this time in reality. And after weeks and weeks of knocking on his door, the Editor of the Courier gave me my chance. To do a feature story which he wanted, and which was to be called ‘Manhattan’s Clip-Girls’ and ‘—as the Horny-Handed Son of Toil Meets up with Them.’ You know? Honest and dumb laborer—strikes Honky-Tonk Row—meets up with wom—”
“Yes,” she said, “the hustlers, and gyppers, and the clip-joint operators, and all that, that infest this row? And they take him for a ride—at least try to. So-o—that was what you had to get? Wheredja get the regalia?”
He looked down at himself.
“Oh, this? It’s an outfit the City Editor got for me—at the only up-and-coming place in town where, so it seems, you can get costumes as is costumes!—the Manhattan Theatrical Costume Company. It’s known—at least so I understand—as ‘Standard Mex Costume’—and never varies, they say, in masquerade-suit houses in any city, any more than do artists, when drawing Mexicans, ever vary a detail in the standard way they draw ’em!”
“Well, I can soon tell you,” she said, “whether it’s a real Mex costume or not. For—” She leaned forward, and extended her slender-fingered hand. “—for a real Mex jacket always has a certain concealed pocket in the right-handed—that is, a pocket for a spic’s hanky—”
“‘Hanky’ meaning—‘kerchief’?” he badgered, keeping his eyes on that hand.
“Call it what you want,” she badgered in return. “But the said pocket is always right in the edge of the part of the jacket that overla—” Now her fingers were close to the edge of his buttoned jacket and he instinctively drew away. As she in turn, to prevent perhaps being “squelched,” changed her gesture to merely a gentle pointing. And to cover his own confusion at his own “rudeness”—as she withdrew her hand dignifiedly, he looked downward and bent the overlapping edge of the jacket around. And saw, indeed, a tight-fitting slit there, several inches long. Into which he inserted two of his fingers. Finding it lined with silk, as were the other pockets.
“Say,” he said, “you know pockets! Or—or Spanish gents,” he amended hastily.
“Oh, I know lots of things,” she said wearily. “And have lots to learn besides.” He noticed her now looking in back of her, at the hat. “The dollars around that hat,” he explained gently and truthfully, “are hollowed-out counterfeits that the Government’s voided—because they were counterfeits. And containing, each one, 6 cents in bulk silver!”
Now, returning her gaze to him, she asked:
“Where the hell did you get the Mexican lingo?”
“Oh, I’ve been around real Mexicans a bit—at a dude ranch I used to go to in summers—enough to make a sally at their lingo, anyway.”
“It sounded plenty real to me,” she conceded. “I sure thought—even when I was accusing you of being a cop—that you were born plumb in Mexico City itself.”
“I was,” he smiled. “But only because my mother was staying down there—with an old family friend—while my estimable father was on an African hunting trip.”
“What makes you so damned dark as you are?”
“Just a case of that mother having come originally out of the old, old South—one with big black eyes—and jet-black ringlets.”
“Well, I’ll be damned,” she said wonderingly. “I’ll never again believe anything I see. You’re—you’re what the druggist sells when he says ‘I’ve something just as good’! But that New York Central Line employee’s pay-check you showed me downstairs—how the hell—”
“That check,” he explained frankly, “is just one of two phony checks fixed up in advance for me today—according to a certain Machiavellian scheme!—at the newspaper office in case anybody might show any skepticism of Horny-Handed Son of Toil No. 1—who was to be Mister Mex. Both signed, incidentally, by my obliging editor!” He reached into his coat pocket and withdrew, not the one he had first withdrawn, but both. And slid them amusedly over to her. “Both were supplied by my obliging editor’s many, many contacts. One of whom is his own brother, and timekeeper on the New York Central Lines; and the other of whom happens to be Inchpin Nelk, Secretary of the New York Musicians’ Union. And who stamped in there, on Check No. 2 there, from his cabinet of stencils, the name and associated union dope of a Mexican night-club musician—yea, Ramon de Montes-quez!—who just recently died. And—oh, those endorsements—at the top of the back of each?” For she had the checks laid out, backs up, side by side. “Part of that same Machiavellian scheme I told you about! For each check has been endorsed by yours truly—as per the payee line in each—but stamped over slightly, each endorsement, with a rubber stamp. One stamp—the New York Central Lines one—an actual part of the New York Central offices; the other—that night-club stamp—made by my editor for exactly 36 cents. Why? You don’t grasp it yet, I see. Well, ’twas done so that the stamping on either check, being very slightly over the endorsement, will certify to the genuineness of the endorsement at the top of that one—and thus either check can be re-endorsed again, underneath, by muh, in the actual presence of any skeptic—and prove that the re-endorser—muh-self!—is the same person as the gink who endorsed at the top. In short, the payee. A bit complicated, eh?—well, maybe so—but all done in case some bright-eyed cutie like yourself just couldn’t believe that Pedro, track worker—or Ramon, fiddler—as the case might have to be—had ridden, clad in armor, and aboard his gray charger toward her domicile!”
“You sure can swing the words,” she said admiringly. She moved the two checks over to the edge of the table out of danger from any cocktail drippings.
“Yeah,” he said worriedly, “but I have got to swing some words on paper—some 10,000 of ’em. And that’s where maybe you may come in. Yes? No? For I’ve got to do a yarn, don’t forget, on—”
“On clip-girls,” she said calmly. “And the lines they pull. And the life stories they spill. And all that.”
“Right! And I’m telling you all about me. So—how’s about you helping out a poor would-be newspaperman who’s got his one and only chance to be such? For, I take it, you’re—”
“Yes,” she said. “I’m all that you take me to be. I live by my wits—but starve because, goddamn it to hell, I have no wits. I have morals none, of course—and get this sort of a habitation, whereas some gal with half the looks is installed in a penthouse on Park Avenue. The yarn you’d get out of me would be the yarn of a clipped-gal—not a clip-gal. But—”
She paused.
“—but,” she continued, “I can give you a story—one that’s far better than the one you’re on. For the one you’re on can be done at any time. But—if I do give you an exclusive yarn for your paper—will you slip me something for the giving?”
“I’ll slip you exactly,” he told her, noncommittally, “what is usually slipped—for a yarn of whatever caliber it is. But of course it’ll be up to you to dish it forth first.”
“Will do,” she said. “And will leave it to you as to whether it isn’t some yarn.” She reached under herself and withdrew the evening newspaper which had been serving as a cushion—at least of sorts!—for her. And holding it towards him, but upside down, so that he could see what she was indicating, she pointed out a story, with 2-column head, on the first page. Which, he saw, read:
ECCENTRIC MIDWEST MILLIONAIRE McCORNISS
BURIED ON LONELY RIVER ISLAND.
“First, though,” she explained, “have you—or haven’t you—read this particular story?”
“I have,” he told her. “Completely. In a newspaper I bought up at the end of Honky-Tonk Row here, before starting down the block. But which newspaper I tossed away. Though, ’twasn’t a Handglass such as you have there—no!—’twas a decent paper—the Courier!”
She grimaced. And, without even having to take her eyes from him to accomplish the feat, tossed the paper back of her onto the bed. “It makes no difference,” she commented, “what paper you read the story in. For it’s the same story—just told, I take it, in different words? But you’re int’rested in the story that I’m to pass to you—and which is connected with this one—only it’s far far bigger than this one—which seems to have been worth being on Page 1—with a double head. But here ’tis—and catch it: The man that was buried today on that island isn’t McCorniss, the millionaire!”