Free Find a Victim by Ross MacDonald

around in a cloud of cheap perfume. That or the aftereffects of the sheriff’s blow made me dizzy.
    She looked up after a while and showed me a double row of fine white teeth. “I’m Jerry Mae. I love to dance.”
    “I used to.”
    “You got tired blood? You could always sit down and buy me a drink.”
    “I’d rather lie down.”
    She chose to interpret this as a pass and giggled mechanically. “You’re a fast worker. I don’t even know your name.”
    “Lew.”
    “Where do you hail from, Lew?”
    “Los Angeles.”
    “I spent some time there myself. Los Angeles is a great town.”
    “A great town,” I agreed.
    Her fingertips moved on the sleeve of my jacket, assessing the probable cost of the fabric. “What do you do there, Lew?”
    “Various things.”
    “I’d love to hear about them. Come on and sit down and buy me a drink and tell me about yourself.”
    “Isn’t there any place we can be alone?”
    She pushed me roguishly. “My, you certainly sweep a girl off her feet. If you really feel like a party, there is a room upstairs.”
    “Show me.”
    I followed her out, running the gantlet of the bartender’s hostile stare. But he didn’t make a move to interfere. Business was business.
    A flight of wooden steps slanted up the blank stucco wall of the building. Her slim nyloned ankles climbed ahead of me. She waited for me at the upper door. Caught in the light from the roof, her face was ghastly, as if it had been stricken with yellow disease.
    She led me down a corridor to the little anonymous room where her nights ended. A Hollywood bed covered with red chenille, a powder-strewn dressing-table holding an imitation-ivory radio, a sink in one corner. She closed the Venetian blind over the single window and paused by the radio.
    “You like music, Lew?”
    “I can do without it.”
    There were no chairs in the room. I sat on the bed. Love or something like it had broken its back.
    She stood looking down at me with a puzzled expression. Her eyes had the hard dismay that comes from seeing too much for too many years and understanding too little of it. Swallowing her doubts, she perched on my knees, letting her skirt ride up over her thighs. The dead-white skin was pocked with needle-marks.
    “Don’t you like baby?”
    “I like you fine.”
    “Then how do you want me, honey? Peeled?”
    “On ice.”
    “I don’t get it. That’s a new one, isn’t it?”
    “I’d rather have information than fornication.” I lifted her by the waist and set her down beside me on the bed.
    She looked at me with a kind of smiling pity. “You don’t look like one of the talkers. I’m clean, if that’s what’s worrying you.”
    “Nothing’s worrying me.”
    “I have a regular weekly examination.”
    “I don’t doubt it.”
    “For Christ’s sake,” she said. “If all you wanted to do was talk, we could of stayed downstairs. Now you got to pay for the room.”
    “How much?”
    “Five bucks. And ten for me. I charge the same for talking, that’s only fair. So what do we talk about, how I got into the racket? Or do you want to hear about the various fellows?
    “I’m interested in one fellow in particular. Tony Aquista. Know him?”
    “Sure I know him. He never went with me, though. Personally, I wouldn’t have him. I always thought he was a little psycho.”
    “Is that what Jo thought, too?”
    Her face hardened under its mask of paint. “I wouldn’t know what Jo thought.”
    “Didn’t she go with him?”
    “Maybe she played around with him a little bit, strictly for laughs. I guess she took him home a few times.”
    “Recently?”
    “Yeah, the last couple of weeks. The boss brought him in one night—”
    “Kerrigan brought him in?”
    “Yeah. He must of told her to be nice to him. I don’t know of any other reason why she would bother with Tony. He hasn’t even got white blood in his veins, and he’s a kind of a psycho, like I said, and an awful lush. You should of seen him last time he