Free Death House Doll by Day Keene

Maggie?”
    What could I tell him? The truth? That I didn’t want
any
woman? That with a world full of women to choose from, I had fallen in love with a big-eyed little doll — one who had been convicted of first staying with, then robbing and killing a wholesale jeweler by the name of Stein?
    “Tell her I’ll be back,” I lied.
    After the foul air in the club, the street smelled sweet and clean. There was a lighted hotel sign in the next block. I walked back the way I had come. The” light on the corner was against me. I stood waiting for it to change, then felt the short hairs on the back of my neck tingle, as a radio patrol car drove up beside me for the red light.
    The squawking two-way on the dash of the car was describing me.
    “… Six-feet-two inches tall. Approximately two hundred pounds … Red hair … Blue eyes … Deeply tanned … When last seen Duval was in uniform … He is a technical sergeant in the infantry and is wearing four banks of campaign ribbons and bars … This man is armed and mentally sick … Code 34 …”
    I wished I knew what Code 34 meant. The cop sitting nearest me yawned almost in my face. All he saw was the Leghorn hat and the gray gabardine suit. “Poor devil,” he said to his partner. “One of them cases of war neuroses, I betcha. It stands to reason. A guy can only take so much and then he blows his top.”
    The cop driving the car was noncommittal. “Could be. On the other hand, I caught more hell at St. Lo than you could jam into Soldier Field. What I mean is they did it to us. And there still ain’t anything so wrong with me that a dame and a bottle can’t cure it.”
    The police car drove on as the light changed. I walked on up the street and checked into the hotel, registering as Jim Cole. It wasn’t much of a hotel. The room and bath to which the clerk assigned me was on the second floor in front.
    The bell boy raised the window as high as it would go. “Anything I can get you, sir?” he asked. He leaned on the word anything.
    “No. Not a thing,” I said.
    When he had gone I stripped off my clothes and soaked my feet in the tub. I showered and washed out my shorts and socks and hung them on towel racks to dry. Then without bothering to fold down the spread, I turned out the light and lay down on the bed to wait for morning.
    The darkness covered me like a blanket. Through the open window I could hear music, faintly, and now and then the rumble of a streetcar. A couple checked into the room next door, the girl giggling and saying, “Don’t, John,” from time to time.
    The night grew older and darker. The girl in the room next door stopped saying
don’t
and put an
oh
in front of
John.
    I wished the wall was thicker.
    I wished I had waited for Maggie.
    “Think of me,”
Mona had said.
    I wished I could stop thinking of her.
    Sometime toward morning I slept.

Chapter Nine
    M ORNING DAWNED gray and naked. With the neon signs turned off and the hustlers and B-girls and barmen and suckers still in their sacks, North Clark Street was just another street.
    I stood at the window a long time, watching the early morning rush of Loop-bound traffic. It tapered off shortly before nine. I wanted to see Mona’s lawyer as soon as I could but I doubted that he would be in his office much before ten o’clock. To keep from showing my face on the street before I had to, I phoned the desk to send up a bell boy. Then I sent him out for a morning paper, a pint of rye, a quart of coffee and a half-dozen western sandwiches.
    The boy was a middle-aged man, a different bell boy from the one who had shown me to my room. As he set the greasy brown paper sacks on the scarred dresser, he grinned knowingly. “Kind of weaning a small drunk, eh, fellow?”
    “Yeah, just a small one,” I lied.
    I wished he’d get out. He didn’t. He opened the pint of rye and rolled the ten-dollar bill I’d given him around one of his fingers. “Well, if you lose the toss,” he winked, “that is, if