Read The Golden Gizmo for Free Online Page B

and slid off the stool. "Getting late," he remarked. "Think we'd better be getting on to dinner, don't you?"
    "No," said Elaine promptly, crinkling her face at him. "Not hungry. Gonna stay right here. Jus' me an' you an' nice bartender."
    The bartender beamed foolishly and frowned at Toddy. Toddy gave him an appraising stare.
    "I think," he said, "the nice bartender is in danger of losing his nice license. Which is worth a nice twenty-five thousand for a nice place like this. It isn't considered nice, it seems, to provide liquor to obviously intoxicated people."
    "Not 'tox-toxshi-conshtipated! Ver' reg'lar-"
    But now the bartender had become even more urgent than Toddy. And Elaine was holding herself in a little; she wasn't ready to open all the stops. Toddy got her out of there and into the Cadillac, and she passed out immediately.
    He opened her purse, looking for something that would give him her address. Its sole contents, aside from compact and lipstick, was a wadded-up letter. He read it with a growing feeling of gladness.
    Of course, he'd been sure from the beginning that she wasn't peddling, another b-girl, but he was glad to see the letter nonetheless. Any girl might blow her top if something like this happened to her-having a studio contract canceled before she ever started to work. Hell, he might have gone out hitting up strangers himself. Now, with the letter in his hand, he saw why he had felt that he had known her.
    He had seen her several years before in a picture. It had been a lousy picture, but one player-a harried, scatter-witted clerk in a dime store-had almost saved it. She had only to fan the straggling hair from her eyes or hitch the skirt about her scrawny hips to set the audience to howling. They roared with laughter-laughter that was with her, not at her. Laughter with tears in it.
    Toddy drove her around until she awakened, and then he drove to a drive-in and fed her tomato soup and coffee. She took these attentions matter-of-factly, trustingly, either not wanting to ask questions or not needing to. He took her to her home, a court apartment in North Hollywood.
    He went in with her, steered her through the disarray of dropped clothes and empty bottles and overturned ashtrays to a daybed. She collapsed on it, and was instantly asleep again.
    Toddy stared at her, perplexed, wondering what to do, feeling a strange obligation to take care of her. The court door opened unceremoniously and a woman stepped in.
    She had a bust on her like a cemetery angel and her face looked just about as stony. But even she looked at Elaine and spoke with a note of regret.
    So this was Mr. Ives-the brother Elaine had insisted would arrive. And just when she was beginning to believe there wasn't any brother! Well. She knew how perturbed he must be, she was fond of Elaine herself, and-and such a great talent, Mr. Ives! But it just couldn't go on any longer. She simply could not put up with it. So if Mr. Ives would find her another place immediately, absolutely no later than tomorrow-And since he'd want to get started early, the back rent-six weeks, it was…
    Toddy paid it. He stayed the night there, sprawled out on two chairs. In the morning, he helped Elaine pack. Or, rather, he packed, stopping frequently to hold her over the toilet while she retched, and washing her face afterward.
    He found and paid for another apartment. He put her to bed. Not until then, when she was looking up at him from the pillows-a bottle of whiskey on the reading stand, just as "medicine"-did she seem to take any note of what he had done.
    "Sit down here," she said, patting the bed. And he sat down. "And maybe you'd better hold my hand," she said. And he held it. "Now," she said, her face crinkling into a frown, "what am I going to do about you?"
    "Do?" Toddy grinned.
    "Now, you know what I mean," she said severely. "I'm broke. I'm not working and I don't know when I will be. I guess I should ask you to sleep with me, but I've never done anything