had to be cash or a certified check? All right, I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you anything you want to know. That’s the kind of girl I am. Always was.”
She went on that way for five minutes, telling me in detail just which and what sort of a girl she was, and always had been, and why. I yes-yes’d her until I got a chance to cut in with:
“All right, now why did it have to be a certified check?”
She shut one eye, waggled a forefinger at me, and said:
“So he couldn’t stop payment. Because he couldn’t have used the stuff I sold him. It was good, all right. It was too good. It would have put his old man in jail with the rest of them. It would have nailed Papa Elihu tighter than anyone else.”
I laughed with her while I tried to keep my head above the gin I had guzzled.
“Who else would it nail?” I asked.
“The whole damned lot of them.” She waved a hand. “Max, Lew Yard, Pete, Noonan, and Elihu Willsson—the whole damned lot of them.”
“Did Max Thaler know what you were doing?”
“Of course not—nobody but Donald Willsson.”
“Sure of that?”
“Sure I’m sure. You don’t think I was going around bragging about it ahead of time, do you?”
“Who do you think knows about it now?”
“I don’t care,” she said. “It was only a joke on him. He couldn’t have used the stuff.”