Free Shakedown by William Campbell Gault

girl likes you.”
    Nothing from me.
    “Everybody seems to like you,” she said, “but you can’t forget the police killed your father, can you?”
    “Cut it out,” I told her. “Don’t make like a psychiatrist. You haven’t got the beard. I can’t forget what kind of a world this is, if that’s what you mean.”
    “There’s justice in it,” she said quietly. “It may be crude, and sometimes we don’t recognize it, but we always pay for our sins, Joe.”
    “All right, we pay. So the more money I get, the more I can pay for. I’ll buy my way to immortality.”
    “Your father was Catholic, Joe?”
    “And my mother Lutheran. Isn’t that a sweet set-up?”
    “And what are you, Joe?”
    “I’m a cultist. I worship money.”
    She began to chuckle. “Well, anyway, you’re consistent.” She leaned over to put a finger into the basin of hot water. “That’s too cool.” She stood up and looked down at me a moment before taking the basin out to the kitchen.
    I wondered if Florence Nightingale had her build.
    Josie came back before Jean had finished in the kitchen. Josie said quietly, “You have a wonderful girl. She is an angel.”
    “Yes,” I said. An angel? Jean Roland?
    Then Jean came in and saw the dress Josie was wearing, the cheap cotton dress she’d worn when she came here yesterday.
    Jean shook her head. “Not that thing, Josie. Burn it.”
    “But those others are—so fine—I thought—”
    Jean said, “Josie, if you want to be expensive, you’ve got to look expensive, inside and out. You have to get used to good clothes and good living so it all seems natural to you.
    This was a little different from the palaver she’d been handing me. This was the way she really believed.
    She said, “Girls haven’t the weapons men have, Josie. So they’ve got to look expensive, at least. Price is one thing all men understand and value.”
    Jean looked at me. “What are you grinning at, ape?”
    “I was thinking of poor, defenseless Jean Roland.”
    Josie said, “Jean means like the Condor girl. It is the good girls who are defenseless.”
    Silence. Jean put my hand gently into the new basin of hot water. She changed the cool, wet cloth on my lips. Josie went back into the bathroom. Jean lighted a cigarette and went to leaf through my stacks of records. Art Tatum was what she settled for and I had a lot of them.
    “Hungry?” she asked.
    “I could eat, if this lip doesn’t get in the way.”
    “Soup?”
    “Eggs. I’ll get ’em down.”
    “Okay. You stay right here. I’ll feed you.”
    We talked about Papa and Deutscher while she fed me, Charles Adam Roland had double-crossed partners before and it just isn’t a thing that’s done in the big con.
    “And that Deutscher,” she said. “Dad brought him in for no reason I can think of.”
    “Deutscher has something on him. Deutscher might be planning a cross of his own. Your papa may not be as smart as he thinks he is, teaming up with Deutscher.”
    “Papa,” she said, “is exactly as smart as he thinks he is, no more or less. He can’t afford to underestimate or overestimate himself in his trade.”
    “So—then what?”
    “You could watch them.” She gave me a sip of coffee.
    “Tail them? Which one? Not Deutscher! He’d know it in a minute. And your dad is probably conditioned to watch for tails.”
    She shook her head irritably. “We’ve got to watch them, Joe. I know Dad checked out of the hotel. If you could learn where he’s staying—”
    “Why?”
    “Because last time, before he collected the money from my friends, he did the same thing, moved out of the place where I thought he was staying.”
    “You think Willi’s that close to being sold?”
    “Dad must think so. He and Willi are going to the ballet tonight. He’s moving right in there.”
    “Willi—going out with a man?”
    “Why not? Wouldn’t you go to a show with a man, or a fight? Willi doesn’t mind cultured men—except sexually.”
    I thought about