“I want to buy twenty dollars’ worth of information,” I said.
“What about?”
“About the days when you were working in the Mermaid’s Roost.”
She said, “I never worked there.”
I said, “Just a little information between friends.”
“You’ve been talking with Ranigan,” she said, “and he’s cuckoo. I never worked in his place in my life. He thought I did, and it’s part of my duties to kid the customers along.”
I gently slid the twenty-dollar bill back and forth. “Couldn’t you use twenty bucks?” I asked.
“Of course I could, but — what do you want to know?”
“Nothing that’s going to hurt you,” I said. “There was a hostess, Amelia Sellar. Do you remember her?”
She reached out with long, tapering fingers, and placed coral-tinted nails on one edge of the twenty-dollar bill. She said, “Yes.”