Skirts Bring Me Sorrow by Hank Janson

Author:Hank Janson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Telos Publishing Ltd

CHAPTER EIGHT

There’s one thing to be said for the Press Club. You can get a good dinner there in congenial company. I’d reached the coffee stage, was savouring a brandy and a cigarette.

I saw Jenny as she came in and glanced around as though looking for someone. She gave me a sinking feeling in my belly. I turned my eyes away so she wouldn’t know I’d seen her.

I didn’t realise she was looking for me. I heard her high heels clip-clop across the parquet flooring, then her handbag was slapped down on my table and there came the rustle of skirts as she settled herself in the chair opposite me.

‘Hiya, bluebeard,’ she said, hard-eyed and icily distant.

‘You’ve been wrong before,’ I said. ‘You were wrong this time.’

‘I’ve been wrong about you all the time,’ she snapped.

She was getting me mad. If I really had two-timed her with Sandra, I’d have been contrite and apologetic. As it was, I felt aggrieved. ‘It that’s the way you feel, you don’t have to stick around. G’wan. Beat it!’

‘I came here especially to see you.’

‘How charming,’ I mocked.

‘Good story you turned in on Fletcher. I’ve been following it each day.’ Her voice was distant, formally polite.

‘Thanks,’ I said drily.

‘I’m not complimenting you,’ she retorted. ‘Anyone with the luck to hit on the first lead could have turned in a story just as good.’

‘Yourself for example,’ I suggested sarcastically.

‘Precisely.’ She tip-tilted her nose arrogantly.

I’d sweated getting that story. I hated her cockiness, her self-assurance, her conviction that she could have dug up the same story. ‘What was stopping you?’ I snarled.

Her eyes were ice-chips, glinting dangerously. ‘I don’t sit on laps, raise my skirt to get what I need. I get it straight.’

‘If I wore a skirt, I wouldn’t think of raising it either,’ I retorted.

‘It wasn’t your own skirt you had to think about.’

I crinkled my forehead in puzzlement.

‘They published pictures of Mrs Fletcher, you know,’ she said in explanation.

I got it then. She’d recognised Mrs Fletcher as the dame in my apartment. Like all suspicious dames, she’d jumped to conclusions; the wrong ones. She’d figured I’d had to make love to Sandra to get my lead on Dave Fletcher. It was crazy reasoning, because anything Sandra knew, Henry Fletcher would know as well.

‘You figure I found her useful?’ I asked. There was a dangerous edge to my voice that didn’t scare Jenny one little bit.

‘She wasn’t all that hard on the eye, and you did get your story!’

‘It takes a smart dame like you to figure that,’ I sneered.

Jenny’s icy reserve momentarily cracked. The woman inside her gleamed through the defensive shell she’d built around herself. ‘You make me sick,’ she said, and there was a choke in her voice.

Another few moments and she’d break, be emotional all over me. She’d hate it almost as much as I would hate it. ‘Beat it,’ I growled. ‘G’wan. Knock off. Beat it, will ya?’

My harshness helped her. The crack in her shell mended itself. Her voice became cold and precise again.

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