Strip for Violence | Page 5

and it broke or came apart and I had my fingers on the heavy rise of her breast. I could still remember all the reasons for not tangling with strays.
"Aren't you even going to kiss me?"
I moved my head down to duck her lips and ducked into her firm breast, the hard nipple stabbing me in the eye. She giggled. "Now you'll have a shiner."
"But this is the best way to get one," I said, my lips moving against the lush smoothness of her breast.
Her laughter was a high note of hot triumph in the still room as her hands tore open my shirt.
I could still remember all those reasons for skipping quickie affairs--but I didn't believe a one of them.

5
THE SHRILL SOUND of an alarm shattered my head. I sat up. The room was dim with the hard early gray light of morning. The alarm claimed it was five-thirty. Louise got out of bed and shut the damn thing off. She threw her arms back, stretched; even the morning light couldn't change the comfortable curves of her strong body, nor the wild red of her. I didn't object to seeing them, I don't believe in mixing the two "B's"--business and bed. After I talked my last secretary into working between the sheets, the office went to hell. In Anita's case there was another danger--despite her saying she was nineteen, I was sure she was jail-bait, and I'm not that sex-slappy.
Anita was a slender, almost skinny, dark-haired kid, with an eager, sharp face that reflected her constant drive. She looked more like a bobby-soxer than a secretary, but she was an efficient office worker, and I wasn't paying the world's highest salary.
She was honest, a hard worker, and a nice kid--and she was driving me nuts. Aside from throwing her young bosom all over the office (when I once politely suggested she ought to buy a bra out of petty cash, Anita said, "Hell, those two-piece jock straps are for old women.") the kid also had the private eye bug. Her mother must have been frightened by a comic book for Anita thought being a detective was strictly being a super Humphrey Bogart. It was a source of painful astonishment for her to learn that I'd never been on a big robbery, much less a murder, that the private eye business is 99.99 per cent guard work, skip tracing, and maybe now and then shadowing a two-timing wife or husband. Anita lived in a private world of "big rewards," childish daydreams about the "sensational capture of Public Enemy 1 to 10," and junk like that.
Taking my mail, three letters, I sat down at my desk, asked, "Anything worth reading in these?"
"You got two bills, and a case--a great big one, a hundred bucks worth," Anita said with mild disgust. "The boys called in, patrolled the stores last night, everything okay. We're out of cards, so I called the printer. I've also typed out four letters to dance-hall owners, usual baloney. At noon you have a lunch appointment with a slob named Boscom, owns the 5th Street Casino, a real fire-trap."
"Thanks," I said, opening the one letter that wasn't a bill. "Keep working through the directory, sending form letters to the other dance halls."
"Okay, okay, Hal, and don't think it isn't just all too, too thrilling. See this?" She waved an FBI circular. "There's a two hundred grand reward on that armed car robbery in Frisco. Gee, think of lifting two million bucks... even bigger than the Brink's job up in New England. Two hundred thousand bucks... reward." There was a far-away, dreamy, quality to her voice.
I grinned at her. "I know, two more box tops and you can send away for your tin badge."
Anita made a comment about my mother living on a diet of bones. Talking tough was another of her charms.
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6
THE CASE WAS from Guy Moore, who was my MP officer in Tokyo. Now he was a struggling lawyer in St. Louis. An old man had died leaving an "estate"--if you can call a rundown farm by such a fancy handle--to his niece, one Marion Lodge. The case meant a lot to Guy because a bank was handling the estate and if he showed fast action on this, they'd give him some real important cases. After a lot of remembering what buddy-buddies we'd been in the army, Guy wrote he could only afford a hundred bucks, and would I kindly break my back and locate the gal. There was a check enclosed and a snapshot of the girl. The check looked prettier than the gal--she was an ordinary-looking, big kid of about twenty-one, with an overlong nose, and black hair that hung in corny curls. Guy gave me her last known address, as of 1949, on the lower