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doorway and waited.
    She was considering the possibility of being followed all right. She kept looking behind her as she walked, but after she’d turned the corner, she evidently figured the road was clear. I picked up her trail. There was a cheap hotel midway in the block. She went in there. I didn’t dare follow until after she’d got out of the lobby, then I walked in and over to the cigar counter. There was an automatic indicator over the elevator. I watched the hand. It had stopped at the fourth floor.
    The girl behind the cigar counter was blond with stiff, wavy hair. I remembered one time when I’d seen a strand cut from the rope used by a hangman in San Quentin. A traveling salesman had it, and he had combed the strands all out. That girl’s hair was about the same color, had about the same wave, and looked to be just about as stiff. She had light eyebrows, and big green eyes. She’d managed to get the expression on her face that one associated with virginal innocence back in nineteen hundred and six; mouth puckered up, eyebrows raised, lashes long and curly. It was the expression of a kitten just venturing out of the back closet into the living-room.
    I said, “Listen, sister, I’m a traveling salesman. I’ve got a bill of goods I can sell the Atlee Amusement Corporation, but I have to have an inside track. There’s a gambler here in the hotel who can give it to me. I don’t know his name.” Her voice was as hoarse and harsh as that of a politician the morning after election. She said, “What the hell do you take me for?”
    I took ten bucks of Bertha Cool’s expense money out of my pocket, and said, “A girl who knows all the answers.” She lowered her eyes demurely. Crimson-tinted fingernails slid across the counter toward the ten bucks. I clamped down on it, and said, “But the answer has to be right.”
    She leaned toward me. “Tom Highland,” she said. “He’s your man.”
    “Where does he live?” I asked.
    “Here in the hotel.”
    “Naturally. What room?”
    “Seven-twenty.”
    “Try again,” I said.
    She pouted and lowered her eyes. Her nose and chin came up in the air.
    I said, “All right, if you feel that way about it,” and folded the ten bucks and started to put it into my pocket. She glanced at the elevator, leaned across, and whispered to me, “Jed Ringold, four-nineteen, but for God’s sake, don’t say I told you, and don’t bust in on him. His sweetie has just gone up.”
    I passed her the ten.
    The clerk was looking at me, so I fished around a bit, looking over the cigars. “What’s the matter with the clerk?” I asked.
    “Jealous,” she said with a little grimace.
    I tapped a gloved forefinger on the counter. “Okay,” I said, “give me a couple of those,” took the cigars, and walked over to where the clerk was standing at the counter. “Poker game running down the street,” I said. “I want to get away for a couple of hours’ sleep, then go back. What have you got, something around the fourth floor?”
    “Four-seventy-one,” he suggested.
    “Where is it?”
    “On the corner.”
    “Nothing doing.”
    “Four-twenty?”
    I said, “Brother, I’m funny, but I always get along with the odd numbers. Four-twenty sounds about right, only it’s even. Have you got four-seventeen or four-nineteen or four-twenty-one?”
    “I can give you four-twenty-one.”
    “How much?”
    “Three bucks.”
    “With a bath?”
    “Sure.”
    I took three dollars out of my pocket and slid it across the counter. He smacked his palm down on a bell and called out, “Front!”
    The boy walked out of the elevator. The clerk handed him a key and said to me, “You’ll have to register, Mr.— er—”
    “Smith,” I said. “John Smith. You write it. I’m going to sleep.”
    The boy saw I had no baggage and was giving me the fishy eye. I tossed him a quarter and said, “Snap out of it, son, and smile.”
    He showed his teeth in a grin and took me up. “Work all night?”