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to give up my favorite vice, I’d just as soon lay down and fold my hands around a lily and pass on into another life.”
    “Good for you,” I said. “You were going to tell me something about Hester.”
    “Yes, I was. I hated to say it right out in front of the husband. I had to evict her.”
    “What for?”
    “Carrying on,” she said vaguely. “The girl’s a fool about men. Doesn’t he know that?”
    “It seems to be at the back of his mind. Any particular men?”
    “One particular man.”
    “Not Clarence Bassett?”
    “Mr. Bassett? Heavens, no. I’ve known Mr. Bassett goingon ten years—I ran the snack bar at the club until my legs give out—and you can take my word for it, he ain’t the carrying-on
type
. Mr. Bassett was more like a father to her. I guess he did his best to keep her out of trouble, but his best wasn’t good enough. Mine, either.”
    “What kind of trouble did she get into?”
    “Man trouble, like I said. Nothing that you could put your finger on, maybe, but I could see she was heading for disaster. One of the men she brought here to her house was a regular gangster type. I
told
Hester if she was going to have bums like him visiting her, spending the night, she’d have to find another house to do it in. I felt I had a right to speak out, knowing her from childhood and all. But she took it the wrong way, said she would look after her affairs and I could look after mine. I told her what she did on my property
was
my affair. She said, all right, if that’s the way you feel about it she’d get out, said I was an interfering old bag. Which maybe I am, at that, but I don’t take talk like that from any flibberty-gibbet who plays around with gunmen.”
    She paused for breath. An ancient refrigerator throbbed emotionally in the corner of the kitchen. I took a sip of my coffee and looked out the window which overlooked the street. George Wall was sitting in the front seat of my car with a rejected expression on his face. I turned back to Mrs. Lamb:
    “Who was he, do you know?”
    “I never did learn his name. Hester wouldn’t tell me his name. When I took the matter up with her, she said he was her boyfriend’s manager.”
    “Her boyfriend?”
    “The Torres boy. Lance Torres, he calls himself. He was a fairly decent boy at one time, least he put up a nice front when he had his lifeguard job.”
    “Was he a lifeguard at the club?”
    “Used to be, for a couple of summers. His Uncle Tony got him the job. But lifeguard was too slow for Lance, he had to be a big shot. I heard he was a boxer for a while and then he got into some trouble, I think they put him in jail for it last year.”
    “What kind of trouble?”
    “I don’t know, there’s too many good people in the world to make it worth my while to keep track of bums. You could of knocked me over with a brick when Lance turned up here with his gunman friend, sucking around Hester. I thought he had more self-respect.”
    “How do you know he was a gunman?”
    “I saw him shooting, that’s how. I woke up one morning and heard this popping noise down on the beach. It sounded like gunfire. It was. This fellow was out there shooting at beer bottles with a nasty black gun he had. That was the day I said to myself, either she stops messing around with bums or good-by Hester.”
    “Who was he?”
    “I never did learn his name. That nasty snub-nosed gun and the way he handled it was all I needed to know about him. Hester said he was Lance’s manager.”
    “What did he look like?”
    “Looked like death to me. Those glassy brown eyes he had, and kind of a flattened-out face, fishbelly color. But I talked right up to him, told him he ought to be ashamed of himself shooting up bottles where people could cut themselves. He didn’t even look at me, just stuck another clip in his gun and went on shooting at the bottles. He’d probably just as soon been shooting at me, least that was how he acted.”
    Remembered anger heightened her