When I caught her, to keep her from falling, she didn’t try to free herself. Instead she looked at me, eyes swimming with tears.
“Let me see him,” she whispered. “Please let me see him before they take him away!”
Chapter seven:
Keyhole-peeping blonde
She was what our maître d’hotel would have called a dish of the most desirable. Medium height, lithe waist, and — not to kick the clichés around too much — stocking-ad legs, diving-girl figger. Say, twenty-twoish. Eyes too large for the small, sunburned oval of her face; behind the tear-glisten they were grayish-green with sparks of deeper, luminous emerald. Like the gleam in a cat’s eyes when headlights hit them. Snub nose, reddened at the tip; evidently she’d had the weeps for some time.
Those lobby experts who claim to be able to name what part of the country a guest hails from, what he’s worth, his profession or business, merely by sizing up clothing, jewelry, luggage, and mannerisms, they wouldn’t have doped out a great deal from her.
I couldn’t tell anything from the white nylon print in Tahitian pattern — scarlet and gray. It went nicely with the pale, corn-silky hair sleeked back from her forehead.
She might have bought that dress in one of the Fifty-Seventh Street shoppes where they tax an extra twenty for the label, or it could have come from a bargain counter free-for-all down on Fourteenth. Her hairdo told nothing. All she carried was that British reeker which had given her away. I did notice she filed her nails short, the way our public stenos keep theirs.
I wasn’t in any rush to let her go. Hacklin moved in beside me to block her off from peeking past us at the body.
“Who you want to see?” His tone was equivalent to flashing a badge.