“Yeah?” he said. “You mean your big Aunt Fanny, don’tcher?”
I shut the door behind him.
When I was sure that he had gone, I went to the cupboard and took out another bottle of rye, stripped off the tissue paper and pulled the cork. I took the bottle into the other room and sat on the bed. I undressed slowly, giving my mind some exercise. When I was ready, I fetched a glass and some ginger seltzer and got into bed.
This all wanted thinking about. It seemed to me that I’d got a job on. That didn’t worry me, but I liked to see where I was heading.
Right now, I wasn’t doing too badly. I was selling articles where and when I liked. Editors liked my stuff and paid fancy rates for it. I’d got a nice little apartment, and enough booze to keep me oiled for twenty-four hours a day.
I leant forward and took a poke at the rye.
Suppose I did start something, and there was an investigation? If the Mackenzie-whatever-they-called-it turned out a ramp, then there was going to be a bad smell around, and I would be the cause of it. Maybe the newspapers would warn me off… maybe I’d lose everything I’d got… just for ten grand. Looked at from that angle, it wasn’t even interesting.
I put the glass back on the little table by my bed and lit a cigarette. When I got into bed with a load of grief like this, I always thought it would be swell to have some hot-looking dame right beside me to listen to my beef and give me an angle to work on.
A woman can be a lot of comfort, and the more I thought about it, the lower I got. I was just getting in a pretty bad shape when the telephone snapped me out of my pipe-dream.
As I reached for the ’phone, I looked over at the clock. It was just after two.