She leered over the bottle her right hand was grappling with unsteadily. “Ain’t you looking for Velma?”

“Is she one of these?”

Thick cunning played on her face, had no fun there and went somewhere else. “Ain’t you got a photo of her — from her folks?”

That troubled her. Every girl has a photo somewhere, if it’s only in short dresses with a bow in her hair. I should have had it.

“I ain’t beginnin’ to like you again,” the woman said almost quietly.

I stood up with my glass and went over and put it down beside hers on the end table.

“Pour me a drink before you kill the bottle.”

She reached for the glass and I turned and walked swiftly through the square arch into the dining room, into the hall, into the cluttered bedroom with the open trunk and the spilled tray. A voice shouted behind me. I plunged ahead down into the right side of the trunk, felt an envelope and brought it up swiftly.

She was out of her chair when I got back to the living room, but she had only taken two or three steps. Her eyes had a peculiar glassiness. A murderous glassiness.

“Sit down,” I snarled at her deliberately. “You’re not dealing with a simple-minded lug like Moose Malloy this time.”

It was a shot more or less in the dark, and it didn’t hit anything. She blinked twice and tried to lift her nose with her upper lip. Some dirty teeth showed in a rabbit leer.

“Moose? The Moose? What about him?” she gulped.

“He’s loose,” I said. “Out of jail. He’s wandering, with a forty-five gun in his hand. He killed a nigger over on Central this morning because he wouldn’t tell him where Velma was. Now he’s looking for the fink that turned him up eight years ago.”

A white look smeared the woman’s face. She pushed the bottle against her lips and gurgled at it. Some of the whiskey ran down her chin.

“And the cops are looking for him,” she said and laughed. “Cops. Yah!”