“My God, he’s fat.”
I nodded at her approvingly. “You’re a brave little woman and I admire you. Luckily you don’t have to toss in or boost the pot now and here. You’ve got time to sleep on it, which is a good idea. Shall I take you home and tuck you in?”
She smiled at me and I grinned back.
“You don’t look like a grifter,” she said. “You look healthy and handsome.”
“Inside,” I said, “I am clean but mean.” I stood up. “I don’t offer to drive you home because I noticed you’ve got your own car. But I can go along just for the air.”
She left her chair, crossed to me, put four fingers carefully and precisely at the top of my forehead, and ran them back over and down my scalp, giving me a comb.
“Air,” she said. “Baby, do I need air!”
“We’ll share it,” I told her. “Ninety per cent for you and ten for me.”
I got my hat and topcoat from the hall, escorted her out, opened the door of her coupé for her, and went around to the other side and climbed in. What I was actually after was not air, nor yet more hair-combing, but insurance against bodily injury. I wasn’t condemning Wolfe for not informing Dazy Perrit before pulling that on her, since he might have thought it up just before she came, or even after she came, but all the same I didn’t care for the sketch as it now stood. If she bounced into the penthouse and blurted it out to Perrit, which she was certainly capable of, there was no way of telling how he might react. Common sense would have told him what Wolfe was up to, trying to get nine out of ten to hand back to him, but the trouble was that there was nothing common about a bird like Perrit, not even sense. Probably he didn’t think there was an honest man on earth. So there I was in her coupe with her.
She was a first-rate driver, fully half as good as me. As she slowed down for a red light at Fortieth Street I said, “Miss Murphy, you’re sunk.”