The Duchess of Skid Row Read Free

took his time but he finally went through the big doors into the hall. I gave him another full minute in case he got the idea of slipping back in. No one showed up. I turned back toward the file Johnny Itsuko had been working on.
    The file was open again. I looked beyond it. I was in time to see the tail of a checked sport coat disappear around the end of the row of cabinets. I started running.
    I reached the corner. I had a brief glimpse of a man scuttling crab-fashion through the door that led to the service stairs.
    I let him go. I had recognized him. And I knew where to find him. He was Hoxey Creen, punk-about-town. He existed on the fringe of the underworld. He’d been a dope pusher, a pornography peddler, a pimp, a numbers runner. The last two years he had lived off a woman who owned a Hill Street espresso house called the Blue Beagle.
    And for almost all of those two years he had been one of my most useful stoolies.
    I stood and looked at the door he had gone through and wondered what he was doing around here. He wasn’t usually seen where he might run into the law. But he had been here, and he must have been watching Johnny Itsuko—or me.
    I returned to the file drawer. There was nothing in it but real estate transfers. I could see where a thick wad of papers had been crammed down, crumpling the flimsy paper of some of the legal documents. But that something was gone.
    And Hoxey had taken it.
    I was curious to know if the regular contents of the drawer had any meaning, or if Johnny had chosen it at random as a place to hide the papers. I decided those contents might have meaning after I read the label on the front of the drawer. The papers inside concerned Hill Street properties.
    Hill Street is Puget City’s Skid Row. Once the big fir logs cut from the timber that covered the hill had been skidded down it to the mill on the shore of Puget Sound. Then the city grew and Hill Street became the central business district. The city grew even more, and slowly, inevitably, it deteriorated. Today it is a collection of honky tonks, cheap flophouses, cut-rate businesses, and pawnshops. It is also where the majority of Puget City’s criminals hang out, and where the few petty rackets the administration had left as a safety valve flourished.
    And Hill Street is the most likely place for a Combine man to buy a legitimate business as a front while he sets up a big racket.
    I pulled out the crumpled papers. They were old. I put them back and dug deeper. I was nearly to the rear of the drawer when I hit the mother lode.
    I saw why Johnny Itsuko had been interested in this particular drawer. I was holding a legal-looking document concerning a piece of Hill Street property owned by Griselda Cletis.
    The document stated that a man named Archibald Archer had applied for, and received, permission from the city to remodel the old Puget City Saloon into a restaurant. The remodeling had been in process just under a month.
    Archibald Archer’s address at the time of his initial application was given as Los Angeles, California.
    A hollow ball of cold started to form inside me. I was beginning to follow Ritter’s reasoning when he made connections between the Combine and myself.
    Because Griselda Cletis was McKeon’s woman as far as Puget City was concerned. She had inherited the Hill Street property from her former employer, a would-be rackets boss. And she had recently leased it to a man who came from the home base of the Combine.
    Ritter had the kind of mind that believed in guilt by association. Griselda had worked for a crook, so she probably was a little crooked herself. McKeon warmed her bed now and then, so he was probably crooked too.
    This was the kind of evidence Ritter could use against me if I faced a hearing on charges of collusion with criminals. And my having spent the last two weeks vacationing with Griselda in California wouldn’t help my case any.
    I rubbed my arms where Griselda’s fingers had left bruises. I put