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

“Hello, honey,” I said.

She looked at me.

I pushed her aside and went into the room. “I don’t guess you mind if I look around.” Hand on my gun, I went into the kitchen, a cubicle of a room with a pile of dirty dishes on the tile sink. One of them was a plate with yellow egg stains; the other, a half empty cup of coffee with a cigarette butt floating soggily in the cold, black liquid. I looked into her closets, the bedroom, the bath. Then I returned to the living room.

She sat on the couch and lit a cigarette nervously. Her skirt was tight across her thighs and an inch above her knees.

I helped myself to a can of beer.

Her sombre eyes flicked across my face. “So you were there... in the alley last night?” she asked. “What did you see?”

“I saw a man die,” I told her, sipping the beer.

Her face was like a poker player’s now, stiff and pale with nothing inside showing. It might have been carved out of wax. She raised one dark, plucked eyebrow. “That was important to you? Men die all the time.” She waited.

“I know,” I answered her.

“This one was a friend of yours?”

“He was nothing to me.”

She snubbed out her cigarette in a cracked saucer on the table. Then she moved closer to me on the couch. Her fingers touched my arm and her thighs pressed against mine. “Maybe you will forget this — this little thing you saw in the alley? Maybe,” she said softly, “Lolita can make you forget?”

“Maybe you can,” I said. I put the beer down.

She was suddenly breathing hard, her sharp bosom straining against the flimsy covering.

I touched her thigh, feeling the roll of her stocking top under the tight skirt. A little moan escaped her lips. “Wait, honey...” she whispered. She caught the “V” collar of her blouse in each hand and opened the buttons down to her waist. Then I reached for her and felt warm, satin-smooth flesh quivering under my hands. I pressed her back against the arm of the couch. She was twisting and moaning under me, damp with perspiration.

Then, suddenly, I wrenched her over, so that I had her right hand pinned under me. I grasped for her wrist, twisted it until I heard the clatter of steel on the floor.

I jumped up and kicked the little knife under the couch.

She sat up and buried her face in her hands. Her black hair fell over her finger tips. In the struggle, her dress had been torn and shoved up to her hips. Her bare thighs gleamed whitely above the stocking rolls that dug into soft flesh.

I grabbed a handful of her hair and threw her head back. “So he told you to handle it alone,” I said. “The man in the alley with you last night — you told him I'd talked to you. So he told you to get me busy on the couch and stick a knife in my back.”

She looked up at me with her sweat-slick face, a pulse in her throat fluttering wildly, and said nothing.

I hit her across the face, twice, back and forth, so hard that her teeth clicked together and blood splattered on her naked breasts.

“I want his name, Lolita. You’ll give it to me if you want to have any face left.”

She panted with a hoarse animal sound. “Vellutini. Mike Vellutini.”

The name the restaurant owner had mentioned.

“He your boy friend?”

She nodded.

“The dead man,” I went on. “He was working for Vellutini, but he was just the errand boy, right? He collected the money from Grace Perring. But your Mike Vellutini is the real blackmailer. He’s got the pictures that are making this Perring dame pay off. Yes?” I gave her hair another twist.

She cried out with pain. “Yes,” she said. “Mike found out Joe was going to double-cross us. He was going to tell Mrs. Perring, or somebody she sent, where the negatives were and who the real blackmailer was — for a sum. We followed him to the alley and got to him first—”

“And your sweetheart — Mike Vellutini? Where will I find him?”

“He has a little night club. He runs a bolita game in the back room.” She told me an address.

I threw her back on the couch and started for the door, but she caught up with me.

“Wait,” she said. “Wait. Don’t leave me now.” Her fingers clawed at me. She started crying, her mouth working. “Mike made me stand there and watch while he stuck a knife in Joe’s back last night so I’d see what happens to anybody who crosses him.”

She said, “I’m scared of him. God, I’m scared of him. He’s a fat, stinking pig. I hate him and I’m afraid of him.”

Then her arms went around me, tightly, pressing her breasts against me so hard they burned through my shirt. “You’re not afraid of him,” she whispered, “or you wouldn’t be tracking him down like this. Please, please take me away from that fat pig before he kills me. Take me out of Ybor City. I’ll do anything for you...”

She raised her face and there was a mixture of stark fear and animal lust in her eyes. Then her mouth was against mine, hot and alive, like her trembling body. Her tongue darted out and her hands pulled at my clothes...

I walked through the hot night with the woman smell still clinging to my body. It had been hard to make Lolita stay back at the room, and I succeeded only when I told her I was going to Vellutini’s. She wasn’t kidding about being afraid of him.

As I walked, I took the gun out and checked its magazine. Then I flicked the safety off, nestled it back in the shoulder rig and went on through the narrow, sweltering streets to the jook place that Mike Vellutini ran. The place where one night a few months ago a St. Petersburg society woman had been indiscreet with one of her many boy friends. Vellutini had gotten pictures of her, drunk and in bed with the man. And now he was making her pay through the nose to keep the picture under wraps.

Clever, though, Vellutini had never let it be known that he was the blackmailer. Always, the man whom Lolita had called Joe had contacted the woman for the money. He carried prints of the pictures. That was all.

I had come across the bay from St. Petersburg as an agent for Grace Perring to meet the man in the alley. I had brought with me a large sum of money to give him for the information that I now had for nothing...

I went into Mike Vellutini’s, a place of thick smoke, dark shadows, not Latin piano, and cheap liquor. An evil hole on a back street where men and women from across the bay could come and hide their sins in sweltering private rooms that Vellutini rented for a high price.

I walked across the floor and somewhere above me, in the layers of yellow smoke, a ceiling fan turned apathetically, casting a shadow, helpless in the muggy heat.

Nobody stopped me as I wandered through the place, into the back room, a closed den, rancid with the odors of stale smoke, beer, and the sweat from men’s bodies. The men sat around under a single light, suspended from the ceiling by a drop cord and covered with a green shade... mostly Negroes from the docks and Latin cigar workers, playing bolita. The room held its breath while the little balls, consecutively numbered and tied in a bag, were tossed from one person to another. The players sat, dripping sweat, their teeth clamped on cigars, staring at the sack. They smoked, spit on the floor, and cursed while they waited to see if the ball clutched through the cloth would bear their winning number.

I didn’t know the face of the man I was looking for, so I drifted through the crowd, seeking a clue to the owner of the place.

I moved down a hallway toward the men’s room. A door opened and a man came out into the hall. He was fat and greasy and dirty. I could smell him from ten feet away. He was dressed in an undershirt, a limp grey rag, soggy and stained with sweat, and he had a towel around his neck to soak up the sweat that ran down the thick, red creases of flesh. Beside the undershirt, he was wearing baggy seersucker trousers and tennis shoes.