The woman led him into the sitting-room, I tagging along behind. They sat on the bench. I picked out a chair that wasn’t in line with the window the Whosis Kid ought to be watching.
“What did happen, Billie?” She touched his grooved cheek and skinned nose with her fingertips. “You are hurt.”
He grinned with a sort of shamefaced delight. I saw that what I had taken for a swelling in one cheek was only a big hunk of chewing tobacco.
“I don’t know all that happened,” he said. “One of ’em crowned me, and I didn’t wake up till a coupla hours afterwards. The taxi driver didn’t give me no help in the fight, but he was a right guy and knowed where his money would come from. He didn’t holler or nothing. He took me around to a doc that wouldn’t squawk, and the doc straightened me out, and then I come up here.”
“Did you see each one of those men?” she asked.
“Sure! I seen ’em, and felt ’em, and maybe tasted ’em.”
“They were how many?”
“Just two of ’em. A little fella with a trick tickler, and a husky with a big chin on him.”
“There was no other? There was not a younger man, tall and thin?”
That could be the Whosis Kid. She thought he and the Frenchman were working together?
Billie shook his shaggy, banged-up head.
“Nope. They was only two of ’em.”
She frowned and chewed her lip.