She stopped him with a gesture. “You have to know about this other,” she said. “Let me tell it first — then I’ll tell... tell the other.”
“Go on,” Mason said.
“Louie — John, is — was a good scout. He was too weak. I’m no tin angel myself. John liked good clothes, good cars. He hadn’t the training for a job. He couldn’t have held one down anyway. He went in for promoting. He liked horses, cards, dice, and gambling... John wasn’t young any more. Things were getting harder for him.
“I could understand him. His sister was figuring on marrying into a rich family. She wanted to keep the family background on the up and up, and make a nice impression on Alden Leeds. She had some dough, some settlement she got from a former husband. I don’t know how much. She told John he’d have to become respectable — no ponies, gambling, or promoting — until she’d got her hooks into Alden Leeds.
“John wasn’t the kind who could do that. His sister put him on an allowance. He stayed straight for a week or two, and then went back to the old life, keeping his sister in the dark. He took the name of Louie Conway and started the Conway Appliance Company. That was where I met him. I was clerking at a cigar counter. John came in and shook me a couple of games of twenty-six. He was lucky with dice all right, and the game was on the square. I’ve knocked around a bit myself, and I saw to that. A couple of customers came in and pretty quick they were shooting craps.
“John was rolling the dice. I was selling cigars. I saw the dice were crooked, but I didn’t say anything. If the suckers wanted to get trimmed, that was up to them. The way I figure it, a sucker is a sucker. If John hadn’t taken them, someone else would.
“Well, John knew that I’d spotted the dice. He came back later, and said, ‘Sister, you’ve got a nice mouth.” I said, ‘Most men talk about my eyes.“He said, ‘I’m talking about your mouth. It stays closed at the right time. Here’s fifty bucks. Buy yourself some glad rags.’
“I took a shine to him. I knew him as Louie Conway. We played around for a while. I was tired of living in little bedrooms and cheap furnished apartments with the furniture all battered up, and the thin mattresses having a ridge down the center.
“Louie got serious — and told his sister. She blew up, said everything was fixed with Alden Leeds and that it would ruin the play to have John bring a cigar-counter girl into the family.
“John wouldn’t give me up. He pretended to his sister that he had. She was suspicious. John started scheming, and then, one day, he came to me and said he’d used the Conway connection to get a stake out of Alden Leeds, and Leeds would never know that Conway and John Milicant were one and the same person. He told me I’d have to help him put it across, that then we’d get married, and he’d tell his sister to go jump in the lake.”