Lawson hiked his ropelike eyebrows. “The little blond doll who took our hats?”
“Uh-huh.”
“So that’s what it was all about,” Lawson said musingly. “Is she something special to you?”
“Yeah. She’s my cloakroom girl.”
“If that’s all, why not let them have her?” Lawson asked in a reasoning tone. “I don’t care how much trouble you get yourself in personally, but if you get Cord sore enough, he may move in and take over the whole town. I haven’t got enough guns to fight the Syndicate.”
“I have,” Ross said savagely. “Just my own. Is that all you wanted to talk about?”
“Now don’t go off half cocked, Clancy. The Syndicate has had its eye on this town for years. I’ve kept them out almost single-handed by keeping on friendly terms with most of the big boys. Whenever I can do one of them a small favor, I do it. That’s why I got George Mott in your club tonight. I didn’t ask why he wanted in. It was just one of those things you have to do to stay on good terms.”
“You can toady up to that bunch of pimps and dope pushers if you want, Bix. I wouldn’t bother to spit on them.”
Brushing past the bigger man, he stalked over to the sofa and gazed bleakly down at the two men seated there.
“I have a message for your boss, Whitey Cord,” he announced. “Tell him he stays alive exactly as long as Stella Parsons does. He’d better pray she doesn’t accidentally fall out a window or get run over by a hit-and-run driver, because if anything at all happens to her, I won’t bother to look around for murder evidence. And I won’t bother with the underlings who actually do the job. I’ll head straight for Chicago and shoot his navel back into his pelvis.”
The two men stared up at him silently.
“I also have a message for you two,” Ross continued. “Be out of town on the next plane to Chicago. The next time I see either one of you in this town, you’re dead.”
Spinning on his heel, he stalked to the door, then turned with his hand on the latch. “Would you like a message, too, Bix?”
“I didn’t finger the damned girl,” Lawson said wearily. “Save your messages for people who push you around on purpose.”
Ross gave the assemblage a frigid smile, pulled open the door and stepped through it.
CHAPTER VII
ROSS LEFT THE CAR—probably stolen—in which George Mott had driven them to the hotel and took a cab back to the club. It was past three-thirty when the elevator let him off at his third-floor apartment.
Sam Black was seated at the front-room bar sipping a bourbon highball. Stella nursed a similar drink on the huge round ottoman in the center of the room.
Dropping his hat on an end table, Ross moved behind the bar and began mixing a Scotch and soda. Black gave him an inquiring look.
“They should be on their way out of town by now,” Ross said.
“Hmm. Not voluntarily, I don’t suppose.”
“At my suggestion,” Ross admitted.
Black muttered gloomily, “I suppose you knocked their heads together to impress upon them the need for haste.”
Ross took a sip of his drink. “I didn’t lay a hand on them,” he said in a tone of regret.
“Well, well. Your manners are improving. Maybe the Syndicate will only send in a platoon of machine-gunners to repay your courtesy instead of its whole army.”
Stella said, “I wish you had just let me run, Clancy.”
“I will. You can run to bed. Did Sam pick up your clothes?”
She nodded. “He put me in the pink bedroom. Is that all right?”
“Sure.” He rounded the bar with the drink in his hand. “Probably it would be safe for you to go home, but we won’t take any chances. For the time being I don’t want you to leave the building unless I’m along.”
She gave him a rueful smile. “I’m putting you to an awful lot of trouble.”
“He makes his own trouble,” Black said. Tossing off the rest of his drink, he rose to his feet. “I’m going home.”
Stella rose also, carried her empty glass to the bar and set it down. “And I’m going to bed. Thanks a lot, Sam, for going after my things.” She looked at Ross. “I don’t know how to thank you, Clancy, so I’ll just say good night.”
“Good night, Stella.”
As the girl moved into the center hall, Sam Black headed for the door. “See you tomorrow, Clancy.”
“Yeah,” Ross replied.
When Black had gone, Ross left his drink standing on the bar while he went to his bedroom long enough to hang up his suit coat, remove his shoulder harness and strip off his tie. He had barely returned to the front room when Stella appeared in the doorway from the hall. She was barefooted and wore a black semitransparent nightgown which dimly showed the outline of her white body beneath it.
In a tentative voice she said, “Are you going to stay up awhile?”
“Until I finish my drink. Want one?”
She shook her head. “I’ll watch you, if you don’t mind. I don’t feel like sleep.”
Padding into the room, she crossed her arms on the end of the bar, a couple of feet from where he stood. When she leaned her flat stomach against the bar, it had the effect of cradling her rather full but firm breasts in her arms and tightening the black nylon across them. The nightgown was tied decorously at the throat, but beneath the overhead bar-light it became more than just semitransparent. The white plumpness of her breasts and the darker circles of their tips were clearly visible.
Ross regarded her thoughtfully and took a sip of his drink.
“Sam and I were discussing you while we waited,” she said. “Did your ears burn?”
“What do you mean, discussing me?”
“I asked questions about you. Sam said he was your topkick in Korea when you were a fuzzy-cheeked second lieutenant.”
The gambler grinned. “I guess I was a trial to him. I was twenty years old and fresh out of college with an R.O.T.C. commission. Sam was nearly thirty and a World War II vet with a vast dubiousness about shavetails. He taught me the ropes.”
“He said you were a fine officer, even though you were so young. He said you once saved his life.”
“Did he mention saving mine twice?” Ross asked.
The girl looked surprised. “No.”
“He wouldn’t. He earned a Silver Star doing it the second time. I don’t suppose he mentioned that either.”
She shook her head. “He only talked about you. He thinks a lot of you.”
“It’s mutual. We’ve been friends since nineteen fifty-two. Sam was managing a restaurant in Miami at the time he was dragged back into service as a reserve. After Korea ended, he decided to stick with me.”
She nodded. “He told me how you started the club here, and how shocked everyone was when you made it a casino.”
“By everyone you mean local high society, I suppose. I disgraced the fine old name of Ross.”
“Why did you become a professional gambler, Clancy? Sam says you inherited both money and social position. You could have been almost anything you wanted.”
“This is what I wanted. It’s in the blood. My father and grandfather were both gamblers.”
“Sam said they had an investment business,” Stella said in surprise.
“Sure, and if you think stock-market speculation isn’t gambling, drop in on the stock exchange some morning when trading is brisk. I just picked a different form of gambling.”
“What does your family think of your career?”
“My father’s all that’s left. He’s retired and lives in Miami Beach.” Suddenly he grinned. “Dad says it’s more honest than the investment business. It’s only our former social set which looks down its collective nose. And most of it appears here regularly to contribute to my vice.”
She looked at him curiously. “Still, it seems odd that a scion of high society would enter a business like this, particularly in his own home town.”
“Where else? I like St. Stephen. I st
arted gambling at five, when I learned to play marbles for keeps. I’ve been doing it ever since and I love it. At sixteen I could hold my own in a poker game with anyone. By eighteen, when they let you in local casinos, I knew enough to spot every rigged device they had, from fixed wheels to shaved dice. When I came back from Korea I opened the Rotunda so I’d have an honest place to gamble.”
“Sam says you did it to get under Bix Lawson’s skin.”
“Partly,” he admitted. “He controlled all the crooked houses. He wasn’t exactly pleased.”
“I’m surprised he let you get away with it.”
“So was Bix,” Ross said dryly. “In the beginning he tried to force me into his organization. After a while he gave up.”
“Sam implied you’d had some past trouble with him.” Hugging her breasts, she looked into his face. “He also said something while we were talking in the office which has been bothering me, Clancy. He said that if you had decided Whitey Cord had some justification for killing me, you would have turned me over to those men.”
“Sam talks off the top of his head.”
“But suppose I had been some kind of racket moll who was in this situation through her own fault.”
Ross shrugged. “It’s an academic supposition. You aren’t.”
“But just suppose,” she insisted. “Would you have gone to all this trouble?”
He frowned. “If you’re trying to analyze me, stop it. I don’t care to be analyzed by women. Just accept me as I am. I’m not very complicated.”
“I think you’re tremendously complicated,” she said seriously. “I think you’re probably as ruthless as Sam says you are, but I also think you can be as soft-hearted as any man I ever knew. There isn’t a man in a thousand who would go to all this trouble for a girl he hardly knew.”
“It’s just a matter of principle,” he said. “I consider a pass at one of the club personnel the same as a pass at me. I’d take the same action for the downstairs colored dishwasher.”
“Ouch,” she said ruefully. “And I thought I’d just decided on a way to show my gratitude.”
“Oh? How?”
A tinge of color touched her cheeks. “The way in which women have always expressed gratitude to men they liked.”
He studied her delicate features, then deliberately dropped his gaze to the soft outline of her white breasts beneath the black nylon. “I have a peculiar code of ethics,” he said. “I wouldn’t make a move to seduce you, simply because you’re here under my protection and more or less at my mercy if I got insistent. But I’m totally amoral. If you throw out any voluntary suggestions, you’ll quite likely be taken up.”
A flush ascended from her throat to suffuse her whole face. She stared at him steadily and silently.
“On the other hand, I wouldn’t accept your soft white body merely as a token of your gratefulness,” he said dryly. “It would be a little too much like handing over a twenty-dollar bill.”
Her flush deepened. “You’re certainly blunt.”
“You wanted to analyze me,” he said reasonably. “Now you know how I feel about sex. It has to be a co-operative thing, with the woman having the same selfish urge for gratification that I have. I won’t settle for accepting it as a payment for favors.”
“It isn’t just gratefulness,” she said. “Of course I’m grateful, but if Sam had done what you have, I’d just thank him. I’m almost twenty-four, which is quite old enough for a girl to know her own mind, so you would hardly be taking advantage of my youth. And I’m as capable of human desires as you are.”
“You mean you have hot pants?”
This turned her flaming red. “You certainly make it as difficult as possible for a girl.”
“No,” he denied. “I just don’t believe in skirmishing when it comes to sex. You can’t have polite sex relations. If you think I’m blunt now, wait until we get in the bedroom. In public you can expect me to treat you like a lady whether we ever get to bed together or not. But in bed you’ll be treated like a whore. Take it or leave it.”
Her eyes remained fixed on his face for a long time. Finally she barely whispered, “I’ll take it.”
Setting down his drink, he drew her away from the bar and held her by both elbows, looking down into her eyes. “Not just because you’re grateful?”
Her body began to tremble. “You know damn well it’ll be a favor to me, too.”
Stepping back from him, she jerked savagely at the tie cord holding together the upper part of her nightgown and it gaped open nearly to her waist. Slipping it off her shoulders, she let it shimmer down around her ankles and stepped out of the massed nylon into his arms, stark naked.
Effortlessly scooping her up to a cradled position, he carried her to his own bedroom. She lay as unresisting in his arms as a rag doll, head lolling back and eyes closed. In the doorway he paused to flip on the overhead light with one elbow, then stepped toward the bed and unceremoniously tossed her into the center of it.
Her eyes popped open when she hit, but she lay exactly as she had landed, arms and legs sprawled. Her eyes began to assume a glassy look.
As he tossed clothing onto a chair, she began to shake uncontrollably. When he finally dropped next to her and took her into his arms, hers went about his neck in a viselike grip and her lips moved against his greedily.
A moment later she emitted a sharp gasp, then began to moan in a rising cadence which grew higher and higher until it reached an excruciating peak, abruptly fading away into a long-drawn-out sigh.
“If I wasn’t grateful before,” she murmured into his ear, “I certainly am now.”
Placing his hands beneath her hips to draw her body tightly against him, he said, “If you’re under the impression that that’s all, this is only a momentary rest stop. You’d better start reaching for your second wind.”
An instant later she emitted a second gasp and her arms and legs involuntarily tightened about him. Again her passion rose to a crescendo, but this time she was granted no respite when its release came. Four more times he drove her to the peak of ecstasy before his own body stiffened and he crushed her so savagely to him that she groaned.
“Good God!” she murmured when he finally rolled aside and pulled her head against his shoulder. “I didn’t know there were men in the world like you.”
Then, with a little sigh, she went into a deep sleep.
Ross slept until noon, and awoke to find the pillow beside him empty. Singing came from the direction of the kitchen. Donning a robe and slippers, he went to investigate.
Stella, fully dressed, stood before the electric stove. Eggs and bacon were frying and the percolator emitted the satisfying odor of fresh coffee.
“Where’d you find the food?” he asked. “I never keep the larder stocked because I eat downstairs.”
“I raided the downstairs kitchen. I left my shoe between the elevator doors so I could get back in.”
“The chef will probably call the police,” Ross told her. “He keeps a neurotically exact inventory.”
Coming over to him, she took his chin and gave him a resounding kiss on the lips. “I’m sure you’ll bail me out. I’ll give you three minutes, if you want to brush your teeth, but you haven’t time to shave.”
It was a pleasant breakfast. Momentarily Ross found himself wondering if there wasn’t some advantage to domestic life, but immediately he killed the thought. As agreeable as it was to have a cheerful and shapely young woman across the breakfast table from him, it didn’t quite counterbalance the advantages of bachelorhood, he decided.
For one thing, marriage, to him, would mean monogamy, and he wasn’t quite ready to settle down with one woman for the rest of his life.
CHAPTER VIII
AT A QUARTER OF FOUR, just before the club opened, Bix Lawson phoned. Ross took the call in his office.
“George Mott and Bull Hatton caught the seven a.m. plane to Chicago,” Lawson said. “Thought you’d like to know.”
“Good for them,
” Ross said. “Bull Hatton is Beanhead’s name, eh?”
“Huh?”
“Just a little private joke between Bull and me. How’d they feel?”
“Roaring mad. Whitey Cord won’t take a slap like this, Clancy. If you don’t back down at least part-way, he’ll move fifty guns into town to take that girl.”
“What do you mean, back down part-way?”
“Well, if you won’t give the girl up, will you at least ship her out of town so I can tell Cord she ain’t being harbored in St. Stephen? We’d have to come up with some kind of proof that she’s really gone. Maybe rig a clear trail to, say, Kansas City, then have it go cold there. Whitey is still going to be mad, but I don’t think he’d move in on the town. He’s businessman enough not to waste guns on revenge. All he wants is the girl.”
“Sort of let her skip from town to town for the rest of her life, you mean? With one eye over her shoulder all the time?”
“For Christ’s sake, Clancy!” Lawson exploded. “She can’t mean that much to you. According to Mott, she can’t have been in town more than ten or eleven days.”
“Stella hasn’t done a thing to anybody,” Ross said, “except learn something—unfortunately and accidentally—which could put Whitey Cord in the chair. She has the right to walk down the street without fear. She stays right here.”
“Is that your final word?” Lawson demanded.
“Uh-huh.”
“You’ve got a head like a brick,” Lawson said, and hung up.
For the next few days Stella left the club only when escorted by Ross. She continued to work at her cloakroom job, spending her nights in Ross’ apartment.
On the Monday morning four days after the departure from town of George Mott and Bull Hatton, Stella and Ross were breakfasting in the third-floor apartment when she said tentatively, “You think it would be safe to move back to my room now, Clancy?”
His black eyebrows raised. “Getting bored here?”
“Oh, no,” she said quickly. “I love it every night when—” She broke off and blushed a furious red.
“When what?” he asked with delighted amusement.
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