The Company She Keeps by Mary McCarthy Read Free Book Online Page B

away, while Mr. Sheer and O’Bannon leaned back on the sofa and had a good laugh.
    Now that he had the money, it should have been simple enough to see the girl and get the diamonds. But, frightened and harried as he was, Mr. Sheer still shrank from the direct approach. In the first place, he said, O’Bannon would have to go along, and, in the second place, we would have to get someone to impersonate the owner of the diamonds. But why, I demanded. “You don’t understand how to handle these things,” he replied. He at length decided that his lady friend, Billie, who was a plump, pasty, semi-genteel matron, would be suitable for the part, and he spent the afternoon rehearsing her in the inner room. It was arranged that the three of them, O’Bannon, Billie, and Mr. Sheer, should confront the girl in her apartment the next morning.
    It was almost over. My sense of relief was so great that I bought Billie two cocktails before going to dinner.
    But once again, as in the case of Caporello, the human element in the plot he had constructed nearly betrayed Mr. Sheer. At nine-fifteen O’Bannon telephoned that he was sick in Flatbush and would not consider coming to town. Mr. Sheer went out to look for another detective, and the lawyer telephoned to say that he would be at police court at two in the afternoon, swearing out the warrant for Mr. Sheer’s arrest. “Without fail,” he added with satirical emphasis. Mr. Sheer came back at last with a tall, iron-gray detective who kept asserting that he knew the girl from the Starr Faithful case, and a Negro detective who said nothing but eyed Elmer with steady suspicion. It was at this point we realized that Billie too had failed to appear. The colored detective finally found her, still drunk, in the apartment of an aviator. While we were waiting I told Mr. Sheer about the two cocktails. “It’s too bad, Miss Sargent, but you couldn’t have known it,” he said, mournfully. “She’s been on the wagon for two months and she’s a perfect lady when she’s sober.” At one o’clock I saw them all into a taxi, Billie wobbling, her eyes glazed, leaning on the arm of the colored man and trying to repeat her lines, Mr. Sheer admonishing her to try to forget them. “Don’t open your mouth, Billie,” he was saying. “When we get there, just grab a chair and sit down.”
    Bierman’s lawyer was on his way downtown when they strong-armed their way into an apartment in the Fifties, and found a small, snub-nosed blonde in a maraboued negligee huddled on her bed. The girl began to scream, protesting that she had changed her mind, that five hundred dollars was not enough, that she had never seen Mr. Sheer before. The Negro detective picked her up and slung her over his shoulder, announcing that he was taking her to the Fifty-second Street police station. Billie passed out in her chair. The girl began to struggle, and the negligee slipped off first one shoulder and then the other, and finally fell to the floor. At a sign from the gray-haired man the Negro released her, Mr. Sheer produced the money, and the girl, stark-naked and sobbing, dove under her bed, where about a dozen pairs o£ shoes lay scattered on the dusty floor. She scrabbled about among them, like a little pug dog, Mr. Sheer said, and began to pull stockings out of the shoes, wildly, at random. With the stockings came a quantity of diamonds, rings, bracelets, pins, and clips. The spectacle so unnerved Mr. Sheer that he could not remember at first which stones were Bierman’s. Hazily he selected a few, the Negro detective picked up Billie, who could no longer walk, and they went out, leaving the girl, still weeping, crouched on the floor in the attitude of a Hindu worshiper, before the little pile of diamonds.
    “I was so rattled,” Mr. Sheer said afterwards, “that it didn’t occur to me till we left the building that I should have claimed the whole outfit.”
    He smiled ruefully, and shook his head.
    One morning about a