Lady Yesterday Read Online Free PDF

of her chair. “Is that as well armed as the last one?”
    “Yes.”
    “It’s got something to do with why you’re here and I’m not smoking?”
    “I’m here to buy a pair of boots. And to find out how you were coming along.”
    I sat back. If they won’t bite you can’t make them. “You were right about Wooding,” I said. “He’s sick and scared. But he gave me some line and I’ll run it out as soon as you leave.”
    “Oh.” She made no move to get up.
    “Who’s after you?”
    “One of my old customers.”
    “Which one and for what?”
    “I don’t know.”
    I said uh-huh. I wanted a smoke.
    “I checked into a motel my first two days in town. I didn’t want to show up at Mary M’s unannounced with two suitcases. Third morning, the day I moved out, I found this in my jewelry box.”
    She handed me a three-by-five index card. Someone had drawn a crude skull-and-crossbones on the blank side in red ink, a keyhole shape with two circles for eyes and an X underneath. The ruled side was blank. It was dog-eared and a little dirty. I laid it on the blotter next to my cigarettes. “What makes it a customer?”
    “The box has a false bottom. It’s where I used to put the johns’ money. Some of them probably saw me do it, in fact I’m sure some of them did. You don’t think like a normal human being with that juice in your veins. That’s where the card was, right in the middle under the false bottom.”
    “Jewelry boxes without false bottoms are rare. Anyone could figure it out. Or it could have worked its way out of a crack or something after a long time and you just never spotted it before. It doesn’t look new.”
    “I looked in the box the night before. It wasn’t in there then.”
    “Leave the room?”
    She nodded. “That was my first night at Astaire’s.”
    “Talk to the motel dick?”
    “The night manager, whatever they call them now. He thought it was a joke and I couldn’t prove anyone had been in the room after I left. I had a cheesy lock on the ground floor at the back. Place had entrances on every corner.”
    “Could just be someone playing pirate.”
    “What I thought, until somebody put a bullet through my windshield.”
    “I’m going to light up now,” I said.
    She nodded again and I did it and blew smoke away from her.
    “I wasn’t in the car,” she said. “I parked on the street in front of Mary M’s and when I came out for the suitcases I saw the hole, about head-high on the driver’s side. Bullet’s somewhere in the seat, I guess. I couldn’t have been inside five minutes.”
    “No one saw or heard anything?”
    “Nobody inside. I didn’t canvass the neighborhood.”
    “Care to guess who put it there?”
    She shook her head. “I tended to satisfy my customers.”
    “Who knows you’re in town?”
    “Just Mary M, and she didn’t know until I called her after I found the card. I always use phony names in motels; old habit. Alice Irving, if it means anything.”
    “Whoever loaned you the car knows.”
    “Not really. It belongs to my fiancé’s old partner in the fishing business. He’s in overseas tours now and he keeps the car in a garage downtown for emergencies and for his friends to use. Charles gave me the claim slip. That’s my fiancé. I never saw anyone, just the attendant at the garage.”
    “What’s the friend’s name?”
    She thought. “I forget. Is it important?”
    “I won’t know that until he tells me. Can you call Charles and ask him?”
    “I’d rather not. I haven’t told him anything about this. He didn’t want me to come here to begin with.”
    I got the location of the garage from her. While I was at it I got the name of the motel she’d stayed in and wrote it all down. “Make a list,” I said. “Even Gandhi had enemies. And get out of Mary M’s.”
    “You don’t know her. I’m as safe there as anywhere.”
    “Just like your car.”
    “I mean inside.”
    “Why didn’t I hear about this last night?”
    She put her