“Okay,” Mason said, looking at the numbers, “let’s go.”
They detoured past a bedraggled blonde who held down the cashier’s desk, and Drake indicated a door which opened on a stairway. There was no protest as they climbed up a flight of dark stairs to a feebly illuminated corridor. The front end of the corridor was apparently fitted up as the office of a rooming house. There was a little counter, a register, a call bell on the table, and a sign saying, “Ring for the Manager.” Drake smacked his hands down smartly on the bell button and said to the lawyer, “We’d better flash a roll and act a little bit hilarious.”
The lawyer pulled a wallet from his pocket, leaned against the counter, and started counting money with the grave dignity of a drunk man trying to act sober. A door opened and a man said, “What do you boys want?”
Mason looked up at him and grinned. Drake motioned vaguely down the corridor and said, “Action. Wha’d’yuh s’pose?”
“I don’t exactly place you,” the man said dubiously.
Mason lunged against Drake, pushing the bills back into his wallet. “C’mon, Paul. The guy don’t want us. Let’s go back the other place.”
Drake said, “Not’n your life. This joint owes me a hun’erd forty bucks. I’m gonna collect.”
The man behind the counter said, “Okay, boys, go on in. Second door to the left.”
They walked down what was apparently the corridor of an ordinary rooming house, turned the knob of the second door on the left. Mason heard the sound of an electric buzzer, then a bolt shot back and a man opened the door.
What had, at one time, apparently been a series of rooms, had been joined into a large room. There was some pretense of giving it a veneer of elegance. The painted board floors were covered with brightly colored rugs. There were cheap oil paintings on the walls, but they were illuminated after the manner of masterpieces, with little individual electric lights shielded in chromium cylinders. There were two roulette tables, a crap table, two games of 21, and a wheel of fortune. A bar at the far end of the room was elaborately fitted with mirrors and subdued lights. There were probably thirty or forty men in the place, Mason judged, and perhaps fifteen women, of whom seven or eight were wearing backless evening gowns. Nearly all of the men were in business suits. Mason noticed but two dinner jackets. “Let’s not waste any time,” Mason said to Drake. “We’ve got this far, let’s go the rest of the way.”