from the Whosis Kid—if he happened to be sitting at his window just now with a pair of field-glasses to his eyes.
“But I am not levelheaded, really,” the woman was saying as I dropped beside her. “I am coward-like, terribly. And even becoming accustomed—It is my husband, or he who was my husband. I should tell you. Your gallantry deserves the explanation, and I do not wish you should think a thing that is not so.”
I tried to look trusting and credulous. I expected to disbelieve everything she said.
“He is most crazily jealous,” she went on in her low-pitched, soft voice, with a peculiar way of saying words that just missed being marked enough to be called a foreign accent. “He is an old man, and incredibly wicked. These men he has sent to me! A woman there was once—tonight’s men are not first. I don’t know what—what they mean. To kill me, perhaps—to maim, to disfigure—I do not know.”
“And the man in the taxi with you was one of them?” I asked. “I was driving down the street behind you when you were attacked, and I could see there was a man with you. He was one of them?”
“Yes! I did not know it, but it must have been that he was. He does not defend me. A pretense, that is all.”
“Ever try sicking the cops on this hubby of yours?”
“It is what?”
“Ever notify the police?”
“Yes, but”—she shrugged her brown shoulders—“I would as well have kept quiet, or better. In Buffalo it was, and they—they bound my husband to keep the peace, I think you call it. A thousand dollars! Poof!