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Greta yawned and then said, “My mama died when I was seven and I went to live with her parents on their piss-poor farm. Grandma used a splashboard almost every day. She’s the one who told me about Greta Garbo.”
“What last name did you add to Greta?” the man I was beginning to hate asked.
“Hammett,” she said. “He was this really cool writer back in the day. Wore gabardine suits and smoked cigarettes through a long cigarette holder made from pearl.”
She yawned.
“He wrote The Maltese Falcon, didn’t he?”
“I…” she began, and then yawned again. “I don’t know.”
She leaned over to place her drink on the hardwood floor and giggled.
“I guess I got up to my drinking limit tonight,” Greta admitted, then she stretched out on the long green sofa.
Malto sat stock-still, watching her as if she were some kind of rare occurrence in nature.
I had seen many things in my tenure as a police detective and as a PI, but I had never witnessed someone being roofied—what Winifred’s grandfather might have called “given a Mickey Finn.”
Malto and I were waiting for the same thing—certainty that the young woman was unconscious.
“Greta?” he uttered after maybe five minutes. A few seconds more and: “Miss Hammett?”
He touched the knee that she had willingly proffered before.
She made no response.
He took off his shoes, then he stood up—stood up like any normal human being might. He stood up, let his trousers fall, stepped out of the pants…
I emerged from the hallway and said, “I don’t get it.”
Malto Lamming gasped loud enough that I thought he might be having a heart attack. This possibility had two distinctly different effects on me:
On one hand, I would have liked to see him die. After all, he’d tried to have me tortured and maybe killed. Added to that, he was about to assault a child who reminded me of my own brash daughter.
On the other hand, I needed information from him.
“Who—who are you?” he asked.
I lifted my pistol and pointed it at his face, unable to contain the evil smile that rose to my lips.
“You don’t know?” I asked.
The nightclub owner tightened his eyes to see me more clearly.
“You’re that—that detective.”
“Sit down,” I said.
He obeyed.
“I wasn’t gonna do anything,” he pleaded.
“Oh? Well, that makes you different than me, ’cause I’m gonna do a few things.”
Malto Lamming began to quiver.
“Tell me something, man,” I commanded.
