It might be the breaks. God knows, Joe had waited long enough. God knows, he hated the bitch with her sharp little teeth. No need to decide right now.

He raised his window quietly and threw the writing pen from the table against the window across the air shaft. He enjoyed the scene of fear and apprehension before the skinny dame yanked her shade down.

With the third glass of whisky the pint was empty. Joe felt a wish to go out in the street and look the town over. But then his discipline took over. He had made a rule, and kept to it, never to leave his room when he was drinking. That way a man never got in trouble. Trouble meant cops, and cops meant a check-up, and that would surely mean a trip across the bay to San Quentin and no road gang for good behavior this time. He put the street out of his mind.

Joe had another pleasure he saved for times when he was alone, and he was not aware it was a pleasure. He indulged it now. He lay on the brass bed and went back in time over his sullen and miserable childhood and his fretful and vicious growing up. No luck—he never got the breaks. The big shots got the breaks. A few snatch jobs he got away with, but the tray of pocketknives? Cops came right in his house and got him. Then he was on the books and they never let him alone. Guy in Daly City couldn’t shag a crate of strawberries off a truck without they’d pick up Joe. In school he didn’t have no luck neither. Teachers against him, principal against him. Guy couldn’t take that crap. Had to get out.

Out of his memory of bad luck a warm sadness grew, and he pushed it with more memories until the tears came to his eyes and his lips quivered with pity for the lonely lost boy he had been. And here he was now—look at him—a rap against him, working in a whorehouse when other men had homes and cars. They were safe and happy and at night their blinds were pulled down against Joe. He wept quietly until he fell asleep.

Joe got up at ten in the morning and ate a monster breakfast at Pop Ernst’s. In the early afternoon he took a bus to Watsonville and played three games of snooker with a friend who came to meet him in answer to a phone call. Joe won the last game and racked his cue. He handed his friend two ten-dollar bills.

“Hell,” said his friend, “I don’t want your money.”

“Take it,” said Joe.

“It ain’t like I give you anything.”

“You give me plenty. You say she ain’t here and you’re the baby that would know.”

“Can’t tell me what you want her for?”

“Wilson, I tol’ you right first an’ I tell you now, I don’t know. I’m jus’ doing a job of work.”

“Well, that’s all I can do. Seems like there was this convention—what was it?—dentists, or maybe Owls. I don’t know whether she said she was going or I just figured it myself. I got it stuck in my mind. Give Santa Cruz a whirl. Know anybody?”

“I got a few acquaintances,” said Joe.

“Look up H. V. Mahler, Hal Mahler. He runs Hal’s poolroom. Got a game in back.”

“Thanks,” said Joe.

“No—look, Joe. I don’t want your money.”

“It ain’t my money—buy a cigar,” said Joe.

The bus dropped him two doors from Hal’s place. It was suppertime but the stud game was still going. It was an hour before Hal got up to go to the can and Joe could follow and make a connection. Hal peered at Joe with large pale eyes made huge by thick glasses. He buttoned his fly slowly and adjusted his black alpaca sleeve guards and squared his green eyeshade. “Stick around till the game breaks,” he said. “Care to sit in?”

“How many playing for you, Hal?”

“Only one.”

“I’ll play for you.”

“Five bucks an hour,” said Hal.

“An’ ten per cent if I win?”

“Well, okay. Sandy-haired fella Williams is the house.”

At one o’clock in the morning Hal and Joe went to Barlow’s Grill. “Two rib steaks and french fries. You want soup?” Hal asked Joe.

“No. And no french fries. They bind me up.”

“Me too,” said Hal. “But I eat them just the same. I don’t get enough exercise.”

Hal was a silent man until he was eating. He rarely spoke unless his mouth was full. “What’s your pitch?” he asked around steak.

“Just a job. I make a hundred bucks and you get twenty-five—okay?”

“Got to have like proof—like papers?”

“No. Be good but I’ll get by without them.”

“Well, she come in and wants me to steer for her. She wasn’t no good. I didn’t take twenty a week off her. I probably wouldn’t of knew what become of her only Bill Primus seen her in my place and when they found her he come in an’ ast me about her. Nice fella, Bill. We got a nice force here.”

Ethel was not a bad woman—lazy, sloppy, but good-hearted. She wanted dignity and importance. She was just not very bright and not very pretty and, because of these two lacks, not very lucky. It would have bothered Ethel if she had known that when they pulled her out of the sand where waves had left her half buried, her skirts were pulled around her ass. She would have liked more dignity.

Hal said, “We got some crazy bohunk bastards in the sardine fleet. Get loaded with ink an’ they go nuts. Way I figure, one of them sardine crews took her out an’ then jus’ pushed her overboard. I don’t see how else she’d get in the water.”