Ричард Деминг - Manhunt. Volume 1, Number 6, June, 1953

The lipstick had a name engraved on it: “Lolita.” The matches bore a picture of a nude blonde sitting in a champagne glass, underneath which some printing assured the reader that the food at Sagura's was the best in Ybor City.

I wedged the murdered man in the cruiser’s toilet and locked the door. I didn’t want the police finding him yet. It would louse up the whole show, because he was not the man doing the blackmail. He had only been the boy who ran errands. True, he could have given me the key to the situation. But the big shot had gotten to him first, tonight, and stuck a knife in him. I needed more time — something I wouldn’t have if this dead man became police property and Grace Perring’s blackmail became a newspaper scandal.

So I went back to Ybor City, the Latin quarter that extended two miles east from Nebraska Avenue and south to Ybor estuary.

I returned and hunted up Sagura’s, a typical Spanish restaurant, a place that cooked chicken and rice, yellow with saffron, black-bean and garbanzo soups, steak catalana, crawfish and spaghetti served with wine. I ordered a bottle of wine and sat at a table under potted rubber plants and watched a string band play Cuban music.

I turned over one of their paper book matches and looked at the picture of the nude blonde sitting in the champagne glass.

“Lolita been around tonight?” I asked the waitress who brought my wine.

She put the wine down and gave me a fleeting glance. “Yo no se.” She shrugged and went away. But in a little while the manager of the place came around and sat at my table. He was a fat man with a round face that looked like a greasy coffee bean. He mopped at it with a white handkerchief.

“This is a hot one,” he said, sighing.

I drank the wine, looking at him. The band was playing a rhumba. A girl dressed in a spangled bra and ruffled split skirt came out on the floor and began shaking her rear.

“The waitress. She said you asked about Lolita.” He looked around at the floor show, trying so hard to appear casual it was ludicrous.

I nodded and lit a cigarette.

“You are a friend of Lolita?” he asked. The sweat was coming through his seersucker coat.

“Maybe,” I said. “What difference does it make?”

He made an elaborate shrugging gesture, ducking his bullet head between bulging shoulders and pushing fat, brown palms upward. “Please, Señor. I am not what you call sticking my nose in your business. Only, well, Vellutini — he’s a powerful man around here...” His voice trailed off with another shrug of his fat shoulders.

I nodded. “Of course.” I drank some more of the wine, and wondered who the hell Vellutini was. “It isn’t important. About Lolita, I mean. I’m related to her by marriage. Knew her when she was a kid in another part of the state. Just thought I’d look her up while I was in town.” I said it flatly, casually, as if the subject no longer interested me.

The cafe manager stood up. “Well,” he said, “she comes around here sometimes. But I haven’t seen her in several days.” In parting, he added, “You might try the place she works in daytime, the Veloz-Rey cigar factory...” And he walked off.

I paid for the wine and left the place.

It was past midnight now and I thought I had better not go back to the boat. So I wandered around until I found a cheap hotel on a dim street, where a man could rent a room for a dollar and a half a night. I bought another bottle of wine in the store just off the lobby and went up.

I lay there, in the hot, stinking night, with the wine bottle on the bed beside me, and, in my rig, the heavy .45 that I had brought along to kill a man.

It was close to noon the next day when I awoke. After dressing, I walked down to the Veloz-Rey cigar factory. I needed a shave and my gray suit was rumpled and the collar of my shirt had soaked itself into a shapeless rag.

Veloz-Rey was one of the many factories of its kind in this part of Tampa. Smaller than most, it was housed in a time-blackened brick building. A rickety stairway led up to the main factory room on the second floor.

Here, the cigar makers, the tabaqueros who rolled the cigars, worked at long tables in double rows.

One of them was the woman who had helped kill a man in an Ybor City alley last night...

I wandered among the workers, trying to attract as little attention as possible. Near the water cooler I started a conversation with one of the “strippers” who had paused for a drink. It was the stripper’s job to remove the stems from leaves and pass the tobacco on to boncheros who made up the inside tripa or filler of the cigar.

“Lolita?” he said. Then he grinned knowingly. “Oh, si, that one.” He nodded toward the tabaqueros. “The little one with the pointed chibabbies.” He took a frayed cigar out of his wet mouth and spit on the floor. “Somebody tell you about her...?”

But I was already moving down the long rows of double tables. Here, the men and women bent over their monotonous tasks, with slim, skillful fingers whipping the tobacco into shape. A radio was on, giving the news in Spanish.

I stopped behind the woman, Lolita. She was young, about twenty and her skin was the color of a dusky rose. Perspiration made her forehead shiny, soaked through her blouse, and ran in tiny drops down the shadowy valley of her bosom. The straps of her brassiere cut into the soft flesh of her shoulders under the filmy blouse.

She worked with a steady, detached rhythm.

An oscillating fan revolved in my direction, carrying to my nostrils a heavy, familiar perfume. And I knew I had the right woman.

“Lolita,” I said softly, and put a hand on her shoulder.

She gave a little jump, and her head twisted around. I got the full force of her huge black eyes.

She stared at me for a moment, with her wide black eyes, and then she took my hand off her shoulder. “I’ll have you fired, you bastard,” she told me softly.

“I don’t work here. I came up to ask you for a date.”

She looked me over speculatively. Her lips curled. “You wouldn’t have the price of a drink.”

“I thought maybe we could talk. You know, about the little game you were playing in the alley last night...”

As I said that, very softly, I dropped the lipstick in her lap. No one around heard what I said, but she heard all right. Her face lost its color. A drop of sweat ran down her cheek. She spread her fingers fanwise over her thigh, covering the lipstick, and she shivered. I bent over her and put my hand back on her shoulder, rubbing the soft flesh under the blouse with my fingers. I let my fingers trail around to the front of her blouse. “You want to tell me where you live, honey?”

She stared up into my eyes as if fascinated by them. Her lips drew back in a stiff grimace, showing the gleam of even, white teeth behind them. I thought for a moment she was going to be sick right there. But she gave me the address in a husky whisper.

“I’ll see you there tonight after you get off work,” I said. “And I wouldn’t mention it to anybody, honey. There’s no telling how much trouble it might cause you...” I smiled at her, and then I turned and walked out of the place.

I went down the street and found myself a bar. I sat there, drinking steadily, looking somberly at the glass and nothing else.

I sat there until dark and then I went up to Lolita’s room. I hugged the gun under my left arm, feeling the good, hard outline of it.

She opened the door. Now, she had bathed and there was a flower in her dark hair. She looked fresh in a clean skirt, stockings, ankle-strap shoes and a crisp blouse with a low neck.

She was a hell of a good-looking woman, and they were pointed.