A. Fair - Gold Comes in Bricks

She put it on the double O and won straight up.

“Let it ride,” I said.

“You’re crazy.”

I shrugged my shoulders, and she raked down all but five dollars of her winnings.

I’ll never know what made me say that about the double O. I was skating on thin ice, sticking my neck out. It was just a crazy hunch I had, but one of those things a man gets sometimes when he feels hot all over, as though he had clairvoyant powers. I was absolutely certain that it was going to come double O again. Don’t ask me how I knew. I just knew. That was all.

The ball rattled around the wheel and finally came to rest in one of the pockets.

I heard Esther Clarde gasp, and looked over just to make certain where the ball had stopped.

It was in number seven.

“You see,” she said, “you’d have made me lose.”

I laughed. “You’re still playing on velvet.”

She said, “Well, maybe the seven will repeat,” and played it for two bucks. It repeated. After that, I quit feeling lucky, and stuck around. Esther ran her roll up to about five hundred bucks, and then cashed in.

There was a brunette hanging around the tables, a slinky girl with snake hips, nice bare shoulders, and eyes that were filled with romance like a dark, warm night on a tropical beach. She and the blonde knew each other, and after Esther had cashed in I saw them swapping signals. Later they were whispering together.

Shortly afterward the brunette started making a play for Arthur Parker, and it was a play. She was asking his advice, getting her bare shoulder within an inch of his lips as she leaned across him to place a bet at the far end of the board, looking up at him with a smile.

I took a look at the expression on Parker’s face and knew I was stuck with the blonde.

“All right,” I said to Esther Clarde, “you win. Where do we go?”

“I’ll sneak out to the cloakroom first,” she said. “I’ll be waiting. Don’t try any funny stuff. In case you’re interested, there isn’t any back way out.”

“Why should I want to get away from a good-looking girl like you?”

She laughed, and then after a moment said softly, “Well, why should you?”

I stuck around long enough to put a few bets on the roulette table. I couldn’t lay off the double O. I never even got a smell. Parker was all wrapped up with the brunette. Once he gave a guilty start and started looking around. I heard the brunette say something about the cloak-room, then slip a bare arm around his shoulder and whisper in his ear.

He laughed.

I went out to the cloakroom. Esther Clarde was waiting for me. “Got a car?” she asked. “Or do we ride in taxis?”

“Taxis,” I said.

“All right, let’s go.”

“Any particular place?”

“I think I’ll go to your apartment.”

“I’d rather go to yours.”

She looked at me for a minute, then shrugged her shoulders and said, “Why not?”

“Your friend, Mr. Parker, won’t show up, will he?”

“My friend, Mr. Parker,” she said grimly, “is taken care of for the evening, thank you.”

She gave the address of her apartment to the cab-driver. It took about ten minutes to get there. It was her apartment, all right. Her name was on the bell marker, and she used her key and went up... Well, after all, as she’d said, why not? I knew where she worked. I could have found out all about her. The newspapers had carried her picture and an interview with her describing the man who had asked her the questions about Ringold. She had nothing to fear from me.

On the other hand, I was in it, right up to my necktie.

It wasn’t a bad apartment. One look told me she didn’t keep it from the profits she made out of running the cigar stand at a second-rate hotel.

She slipped off her coat, told me to sit down, brought out cigarettes, asked me if I wanted some Scotch, and sat down on the sofa beside me. We lit cigarettes, and she sidled over to lean against me. I could see the gleam of light on her neck and shoulders, the seductive look in her blue eyes; and the hair that was like raveled hemp brushed against my cheek. “You and I,” she said, “are going to be good friends.”

“Yes?”

“Yes,” she said, “because the girl who went up to see Jed Ringold — the one you were following — was Alta Ashbury.”

And then she snuggled up against me affectionately.

“Who,” I asked, with a perfectly blank face, “is Alta Ashbury?”

“The woman you were following.”

I shook my head, and said, “My business was with Ringold.”

She twisted around so that she could keep looking at my face. Then she said slowly, “Well, it doesn’t make any difference in one way. It’s information that I can’t use myself — directly. I’d rather work with you than with anyone else I know,” and then added with a little laugh, “because I can keep you straight.”

“That isn’t telling me who Alta Ashbury is. Was she his woman?”

I could see the blonde thinking things over, trying to decide how much to tell me.

“Was she?” I insisted.

She tried a counteroffensive. “What did you want with Ringold?”

“I wanted to see him on a business matter.”

“What?”

“Somebody had told me that he could tell me how to beat the Blue Sky Act. I’m a promoter. I had something I wanted to promote.”

“So you went in to see him?”

“Not me. I got the adjoining room.”

“And bored a hole in the door?”

“Yes.”

“And looked and listened?”

“Yes.”

“What did you see?”

I shook my head.

She got mad then. “Listen,” she said, “you’re either the damnedest fool I’ve ever seen, or the coolest. How did you know I wouldn’t call the cops when you didn’t slip me that two hundred under the table?”

“I didn’t.”

“You’d better get along with me. Do you know what’d happen if I took down that telephone receiver and called the cops? For God’s sake, be your age and snap out of it.”

I tried to blow a smoke ring.

She got to her feet and started toward the telephone. Her lips were clamped tightly, and her eyes were full of fire.

“Go ahead and call them,” I said. “I was getting ready to call them myself.”

“Yes, you were.”

I said, “Of course, I was. Don’t you get the idea?”

“What do you mean?”

“I was sitting in that adjoining room with my eye glued to the hole in the door,” I said. “The murderer had picked the lock about half an hour before I went in. He’d pried the molding loose, fixed the lock, gone back into the room, put the moulding back into place, waited for a propitious moment, then unlocked the door, stepped into the little alcove, and went into the bathroom.”

“That’s what you say.”

“You forget one thing, sister.”

“What’s that?”

“I saw the murderer. I’m the only one who did. I know who it was — Ringold had a talk with the girl. He gave her some papers. She gave him a check. He put it in his right-hand coat pocket. After she went out, he started for the bathroom. I didn’t know this other person was in the bathroom, but I’d found the communicating door was unlocked on my side, and I’d locked it when I bored the hole. The murderer knew Ringold was going to come to the bathroom, and tried to slip back into four-twenty-one. The door was locked. I was in there. The person on the other side of the door was trapped.”

“What did you do?” she asked, barely breathing.

“I was a damned fool,” I said. “I should have taken up the telephone, called the lobby, and told them to block the exit, and telephone for the cops. I was rattled. I didn’t think of it. I twisted the bolt on the communicating door and jerked it open. I followed the murderer out as far as the corridor. I stood in the doorway and looked up and down the corridor. Then I went over to the elevator and got off at the second floor. When the squawk started, I went out.”