In the middle of the floor one of Larrouy’s girls began to sing “ Tell Me What You Want and I’ll Tell You What You Get .” Paddy the Mex tipped a gin bottle over the glasses of gingerale the waiter had brought. We drank and I gave Paddy a piece of paper with a name and address penciled on it.
“Itchy Maker asked me to slip you that,” I explained. “I saw him in the Folsom big house yesterday. It’s his mother, he says, and he wants you to look her up and see if she wants anything. What he means, I suppose, is that you’re to give her his cut from the last trick you and he turned.”
“You hurt my feelings,” Paddy said, pocketing the paper and bringing out the gin again.
I downed the second gin-gingerale and gathered in my feet, preparing to rise and trot along home. At that moment four of Larrouy’s clients came in from the street. Recognition of one of them kept me in my chair. He was tall and slender and all dolled up in what the well-dressed man should wear. Sharp-eyed, sharp-faced, with lips thin as knife-edges under a small pointed mustache—Bluepoint Vance. I wondered what he was doing three thousand miles away from his New York hunting-grounds.
While I wondered I put the back of my head to him, pretending interest in the singer, who was now giving the customers “ I Want to Be a Bum .” Beyond her, back in a corner, I spotted another familiar face that belonged in another city—Happy Jim Hacker, round and rosy Detroit gunman, twice sentenced to death and twice pardoned.
When I faced front again, Bluepoint Vance and his three companions had come to rest two tables away. His back was to us. I sized up his playmates.
Facing Vance sat a wide-shouldered young giant with red hair, blue eyes and a ruddy face that was good-looking in a tough, savage way. On his