Unhappy Hooligan Read Online Free PDF

it.
    Obviously she hadn’t known, but her face softened. “Oh, the sentimental dear! The Polar Club is where Mac always took me on anniversaries and gala occasions: he must have picked up a napkin after I did my lip rouge, and kept it sacred.” Rook looked blank, and she said, “Oh, you men! Haven’t you noticed that after a girl puts on lipstick she uses something to take off the excess? Like this?” Mavis demonstrated with a tissue from her handbag, and then tossed it into a nearby ashtray.
    They were finished and on their way out of the restaurant when he murmured something and hurried back to the booth. The battered fedora he had so conveniently forgotten was still there, but the bus boy had already cleared the table. “Damnation!” said Howie Rook fervently. He had wanted that stained tissue, because his eye for color was usually good, and he seemed to remember that the geranium-colored imprint he’d seen in Chief Parkman’s office was not exactly the same shade worn by Mavis McFarley. He found her impatiently waiting by the front door. “Forgot my hat,” he explained as a cover.
    “You absent-minded geniuses,” she said. “Can I drop you off somewhere?”
    “You could perhaps drop me off at the apartment house where it happened,” he suggested. “Only I don’t clearly see just what excuse I can give to gain entrance to the place at the moment…”
    Mavis hesitated. “There might just possibly be a way. I might be able to fix that, if it’s really important for you to get in.”
    “I don’t suppose you’ve moved back there, or are planning to?”
    “Certainly not! Under the terms of the legal separation—at which time I got a certain settlement, of course, Mac drew up a new will leaving everything to Vonny, naturally. That includes the apartment and the apartment building which he owned, and all the rest. I’m out of it. But—but I do think I have my old key, if the locks haven’t been changed or anything. We could go in for a quick look around. But wouldn’t there be a cop there?”
    Rook doubted it. “It’s a popular misconception that the police always leave an officer at the scene of a murder after the formalities are over. It’s nowadays only done when there is some expectation of the murderer’s coming back to the scene of the crime, which rarely happens in real life. Besides, they’ve got this tabbed as suicide, remember?”
    They drove on west, toward the Village. “This visit is probably painful for you,” said Rook, looking at her sideways. “Not that the whole affair isn’t painful.”
    Mavis looked brave, and nodded.
    “And of course for Yvonne too,” he continued probing. “She seemed quite upset.”
    “Yes. I can only guess at what wild things she said to you about me. Probably that I was carrying on, or something—just because I used to keep in touch with old friends I knew when I was back in show business.”
    “I see. And what was this about her quarreling with her father?”
    Mavis went through a red light. “It was worse than a quarrel; they had a most tremendous fight down at the Beach Club. Vonny went into one of her tantrums and threw things at her father, and somebody called the local police, and there was hell to pay for a little while.”
    “About what?” demanded Rook, cautiously holding on to his hat.
    “Money, I guess. I wasn’t there. She wanted it, a big hunk of it, for some reason or other. And Mac wouldn’t give it to her unless she’d come back home to the apartment and be sensible instead of hell-bent to live her own life yet—at nineteen! You see, Vonny is a terribly spoiled kid, like so many adopted children. Yes, she was adopted—though she doesn’t know that I know it. For some reason she’s always been my sworn enemy. I made the mistake of interfering when she wanted to go and get married last winter; the little fool thought herself madly in love with some impossible musician named Benny Valentino. They even eloped finally; the