Free If You Can't Stand the Heat (Kit Tolliver #1) (The Kit Tolliver Stories) by Lawrence Block Page A

and Eleventh Avenue. They wanted to be able to put his fingerprints on things long after he was dead and gone.”
    “Would that work?”
    “With luck,” he said, “we’ll never know. The Westies are mostly gone now, and the tenement apartments they lived in are all tarted up, with stockbrokers and lawyers renting them now. Which are you?”
    “Me?”
    “A stockbroker? Or a lawyer?”
    She grinned. “Neither one, I’m afraid. I’m an actress.”
    “Even better.”
    “Which means I take a class twice a week,” she said, “and run around to open casting calls and auditions.”
    “And wait tables?”
    “I did some of that in the Cities. I suppose I’ll have to do it again here, when I start to run out of money.”
    “The Cities?”
    “The Twin Cities. Minneapolis and St. Paul.”
    “That’s where you’re from?”
    They talked about where she was from, and along the way he told her his name was Jim. She was Jennifer, she told him. He related another story about the neighborhood—he was really a pretty good storyteller—and by then her Rob Roy was gone and so was his Jameson. “Let me get us another round,” he said, “and then why don’t we take our drinks to a table? We’ll be more comfortable, and it’ll be quieter.”

    He was talking about the neighborhood.
    “Irish, of course,” he said, “but that was only part of it. You had blocks that were pretty much solid Italian, and there were Poles and other Eastern Europeans. A lot of French, too, working at the restaurants in the theater district. You had everything, really. The UN’s across town on the East River, but you had your own General Assembly here in the Kitchen. Fifty-seventh Street was a dividing line; north of that was San Juan Hill, and you had a lot of blacks living there. It was an interesting place to grow up, if you got to grow up, but no sweet young thing from Minnesota would want to move here.”
    She raised her eyebrows at sweet young thing, and he grinned at her. Then his eyes turned serious and he said, “I have a confession to make.”
    “Oh?”
    “I followed you in here.”
    “You mean you noticed me even before I ordered a Rob Roy?”
    “I saw you on the street. And for a moment I thought—”
    “What?”
    “Well, that you were on the street.”
    “I guess I was, if that’s where you saw me. I don’t . . . oh, you thought—”
    “That you were a working girl. I wasn’t going to mention this, and I don’t want you to take it the wrong way—”
    What, she wondered, was the right way?
    “—because it’s not as though you looked the part, or were dressed like the girls you see out there. See, the neighborhood may be tarted up, but that doesn’t mean the tarts have disappeared.”
    “I’ve noticed.”
    “It was more the way you were walking,” he went on. “Not swinging your hips, not your walk per se, but a feeling I got that you weren’t in a hurry to get anywhere, or even all that sure where you were going.”
    “I was thinking about stopping for a drink,” she said, “and not sure if I wanted to, or if I should go straight home.”
    “That would fit.”
    “And I’ve never been in here before, and wondered if it was decent.”
    “Well, it’s decent enough now. A few years ago it wouldn’t have been. And even now, a woman alone—”
    “I see.” She sipped her drink. “So you thought I might be a hooker,” she said, “and that’s what brought you in here. Well, I hate to disappoint you—”
    “What brought me in here,” he said, “was the thought that you might be, and the hope that you weren’t.”
    “I’m not.”
    “I know.”
    “I’m an actress.”
    “And a good one, I’ll bet.”
    “I guess time will tell.”
    “It generally does,” he said. “Can I get you another one of those?”
    She shook her head. “Oh, I don’t think so,” she said. “I was only going to come in for one drink, and I wasn’t even sure I wanted to do that. And I’ve had two, and that’s