James Cain - Serenade

I saw I had led with my chin on that, on account of the white slave charge. He snapped it back at me before I even finished. “Oh, so you brought her to New York.”

“I did not. She paid her own fare.”

“What the hell are you trying to tell me? Didn’t I say cut that stalling out?”

“All right, ask her.”

Then came a flicker in his eye. I had a quick hunch they hadn’t got her yet. “Ask her, that’s all I’ve got to say. Don’t be silly. I’m not paying any woman’s fare from Los Angeles to New York. I heard of the Mann Act too.”

“Who turned in the tip against her?”

“That I don’t know.”

“Come on—”

“I told you I don’t know. Now if you’ll cut out your goddam nonsense, I’ll tell you what I do know, and maybe it’ll help you out, I don’t know. But you can just drop this third-degree stuff right now, or I’ll be starting a little third-degree of my own before long that you may not like so well.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“You know what I mean. You’re not talking to some Hell’s Kitchen gunman. I’ve got a few friends, see? I don’t ask any favors. But I’m claiming my rights, and I’ll get them.”

“All right, Sharp. Shoot it.”

“We went to the party, she and I.”

“Yeah, that drag was a funny place for a guy like you.”

“He was a pixie, but he was also a musician, and I had worked for him, and when he asked us to his housewarming—”

“Are you a pix?”

“Starting up again, are you?”

“Go on, Sharp. Just checking up.”

“So we went. And pretty soon one of the boys came up, and— ”

“One of them pixes?”

“One of the bellboys. And I found out there was a guy downstairs waiting to see me. And I found out Hawes had put in three calls that day to the Immigration Office—”

“Then he did turn her in?”

“I told you I don’t know. I wasn’t taking any chances. I told her what the boys had told me, and tried to get her out of there. I told her to leave, and she did, but then she came back with this sword, and they started up again this bullfight game they had been playing—”

“Yeah, we know all about that.”

“And she let him have it. And goddam well he had it coming to him. What the hell business was it of his whether she—”

“What he turn her in for?”

“That I don’t know either. He had tried to tell me once or twice that living with a girl the way we did wasn’t doing me any good, that it was hurting my career—”

“Your singing career?”

“That’s right.”

“What he have to do with that?”

“He had plenty to do with it. I don’t only sing here in New York. I’m under contract to a Hollywood picture company, and he controlled the picture company, or said he did, and he was afraid— ”

“Hays office stuff?”

“That’s it.”

“Oh, I get it now. Go on.”

“That’s all. It wasn’t just morals, take it from me it wasn’t, or friendship, or anything like that. It was money, and fear that the Mann Act would ruin one of his big stars, and stuff like that. All right, he went up against the wrong person. She let him have it, and now let him count up his Class A preferred stock.”

He asked me a few more questions and then went out. As near as I could tell I had done all right. I had fixed her up with a motive that anyway made sense, him trying to bust us up, and it would look a hell of a sight better after we were married, as I knew we would be before the case ever came to trial. I had kept out of it what was really between Winston and me. I would have even told him that if it would have done her any good, but I knew that one whisper of that would crack everything wide open, and ruin her. I had anyhow made some kind of a stall about the Mann Act and the illegal entry, and they couldn’t disprove it unless she told them different, and I knew they’d never get anything out of her. Around seven o’clock they gave me something to eat, and I waited for their next move.

Around eight o’clock a cop came in with one of my traveling cases, with clothes in it. That meant they had been in the apartment. I was still in evening clothes, and began to change. “You got a washroom here?”

“O.K., we’ll take you to it. You want a barber?”

All I had in my pocket, after giving her the money was silver, but I counted it. There were a couple of dollars of it. “Yeah, send him in.”

He went out, and the cop that was guarding took me down to the washroom. There was a shower there, so I stripped, had a bath, and put on the other clothes. The barber came in and shaved me. I put the evening clothes in the traveling case. They had brought me a hat, and I put that on. Then we went back to the room we had left.

A little after nine I was still pounding on it in my mind, what I could do, and it came to me that one thing I could do was get a lawyer. I remembered Sholto. “I’d like to make a phone call. How about that?”

“You’re allowed one call.”

We went out in the hall, where there was a row of phones against the wall. I looked up Sholto’s number, rang it, and got him on the line. “Oh hello, I was wondering if you’d call. I see you’re in a little trouble.”

“Yeah, and I want you.”

“I’ll be right down.”

In about a half hour he showed up. He listened to me. About all I could tell him, with the cop sitting there, was that I wanted to get out, but that seemed to be all he wanted to know. “It’s probably just a matter of bond.”

“What am I held for? Do you know that?”

“Material witness.”

“Oh, I see.”

“As soon as I can see a bondsman — that is, unless you want to put up cash bond yourself.”

“How much is it?”

“I don’t know. At a guess, I’d say five thousand.”

“Which way is quickest?”

“Oh, money talks.”

He had a blank check, and I wrote out a check for ten thousand. “All right, that ought to cover it. I think we can get action in about an hour.”

Around ten o’clock he was back, and he, and the cop, and I went over to court. It took about five minutes. An assistant district attorney was there, they set bail at twenty-five hundred, and after Sholto put it up, we went out and got in a cab. He passed over the rest of the cash, in hundred-dollar bills. I handed back ten of them. “Retainer.”

“Very well, thanks.”

The first thing I wanted to know was whether they had got her yet. When he said they hadn’t, I grabbed an early afternoon paper a boy shoved in the window, and read it. It was smeared all over the front page, with my picture, and Winston’s picture, but no picture of her. That was one break. As well as I could remember, she hadn’t had any picture taken since she had been in the country. It was something we hadn’t got around to. There was one story giving Winston’s career, another telling about me, and a main story that told what had happened. Everything I had said to the detective was in there, and the big eight-column streamer called her the “Sword-Killer,” and said she was “Sought.” I was still reading when we pulled up at Radio City.

When we got up to his office I began going over what I had told the detective, the illegal entry stuff and all, and why I had said what I had, but pretty soon he stopped me. “Listen, get this straight. Your counsel is not your co-conspirator in deceiving the police. He’s your representative at the bar, to see that you get every right that the law entitles you to, and that your case, or her case, or whatever case he takes, is presented as well as it can be. What you told the detective is none of my affair, and it’s much better, at this time, that I know nothing of it. When the time comes, I’ll ask for information, and you had better tell me the truth. But at the moment, I prefer not to know of any misrepresentation you’ve made. From now on, by the way, an excellent plan, in dealing with the police, would be to say nothing.”