“Three years—a couple up in Colorado, and then this hole. Seem like three centuries.”
“I was back there on a job in April,” I led her on, “for two or three weeks.”
“You were?”
It was just as if I’d said I had been to heaven. She began to shoot questions at me: was this still so-and-so? Was that still thus?
We had quite a little gabfest, and I found I knew some of her friends. A couple of them were high-class swindlers, one was a bootleg magnate, and the rest were a mixture of bookies, conmen, and the like. When I was living in New York, back before the war, I had spent quite a few of my evenings in Dick Malloy’s Briar Patch, a cabaret on Seventh Avenue, near where the Ringside opened later. This girl had been one of the Briar Patch’s regular customers a few years after my time there.
I couldn’t find out what her grift was. She talked a blend of thieves’ slang and high-school English, and didn’t say much about herself.
We were getting along fine when Milk River came in.
“My friends still in town?” I asked.
“Yes. I hear ’em bubbling around down in Bardell’s. I hear you’ve been makin’ yourself more unpopular.”
“What now?”
“Your friends among the better element don’t seem to think a whole lot of that trick of yours of giving Big ’Nacio’s guns, and his hombres’, to Bardell to keep. The general opinion seems to be you took the guns out of their right hands and put ’em back in the left.”