“You heard me. Cripes, look at Evaline. She was a kid. She had freshness and charm. I can turn on the personality, and put on the warpaint, and— Say, for God’s sake, who started this anyway? If you’ve got the blues, go ahead and get drunk. Start making passes at me and telling stories, but turn off this dark-blue faucet or I’ll go nuts.”
“Okay, Carmen,” I said.
The waiter brought our drinks.
“The plain-clothes men talk with you?” I asked.
“Did they!” she said. “They turned me inside out. I couldn’t tell them anything. My God, look at us. We play the game on a percentage basis. I’ll drift around to a dozen tables in the course of a night. Maybe if I’m lucky, someone will fall for me hard enough to buy me a flock of drinks, and after he gets tight he’ll maybe pay for them with a five-dollar bill, tip the waiter, and push the change over to me. That’s gravy. Probably he won’t.
“There are ten of us girls here, and all of them working the same racket. Evaline was part of that racket. How should I know what men shed been playing up to? I’ve got troubles of my own. Wait a minute, I’m going to put through a phone call. You don’t care, do you, Donald?”
“Go ahead,” I said.
She went over to the phone booth and called. She came back a little later and said, “Well, the kid’s resting easier. The cough doesn’t seem to be any worse.”
“She’ll be all right,” I said. “Kids run a high temperature over nothing in particular, and snap out of it.”
She nodded, “I know, but when it’s your kid, it’s different.”