Big Easy Bonanza

friend, and Skip realized she probably didn’t look the soul of hospitality.
    Quickly, she put the .38 away. She was suddenly more alarmed than ever, but not about the possibility of armed intruders. Steinman was a big man, well over six feet and by her best guess well over 200 pounds. At the moment he looked very ill. He stumbled over the threshold and into her arms. She had to brace herself to stay upright. “What is it? What happened?” She managed to get the door closed.
    He put a hand to the back of his head. “Somebody hit me. Took the film.”
    Automatically, Skip’s hand covered his, touching the lump on the back of his head. She winced. “Can you walk?”
    “Let me sit for a minute. Could you get the projector? It’s not mine—I had to rent one.”
    Whoever took the film had wanted only that. The rented projector was sitting unmolested outside her door. She lugged it in, settled Steinman on one of the worn, uncovered wooden stairs, and went up to get him a brandy and a couple of aspirin. For a while he just sat and breathed heavily. She was big, but not big enough to get this one upstairs. If he didn’t recover soon, she would have to get help. Charity Hospital would be a madhouse. In fact, if she wanted medical attention tonight, she’d probably have to go to her father, who’d almost certainly be at home, the Rex Ball having been canceled due to the small matter of murder. But asking him for anything would require humbling herself and was therefore impossible.
    If she’d been religious she’d have prayed, but she was far from believing in anything but her own determination. “Get better,” she sighed, pleading with the filmmaker, but it came out more like a coo.
    He managed a smile. “I am better. The brandy did it.”
    “Can you walk?” she asked for the second time.
    “I think so. Shall we go up?”
    He walked perfectly well, apparently being fairly far along toward recovery. Skip wondered what he’d been hit with. She showed him into her shabby studio, with its Goodwill hide-a-bed sofa now neatly tucked up for her guest, and just as well—when it was open, it nearly filled up the room.
    Besides the sofa, Skip had a chest of drawers, a couple of small tables, and a large dracaena that was usually dusty but seemed to grow no matter what she did (or didn’t do) to it. She would have liked a coffee table, but having to fold the sofa out made that impractical.
    “No pictures,” said Steinman.
    “What?”
    “You have nothing on your walls. I’ve never seen that before.”
    Skip flushed. She’d lived here nearly a year and hadn’t had a single visitor except Jimmy Dee and company. “I haven’t had time, I guess.” She wondered what she wanted on her walls. She’d had heavy metal posters in San Francisco, but would they be suitable for a cop? Wasn’t the whole idea a bit on the sinister side?
    “What,” said Steinman, “would a lady cop put on her walls?”
    “Believe me, I’d be the last to know. Didn’t Cookie tell you I’m no lady? What shall I get for your head? Something hot or something cold?”
    “Damned if I know. How about some more brandy?”
    When she’d gotten his drink and one for herself, she said, “What happened out there?”
    He shrugged. “I’ve no idea, to tell you the truth. I was ringing your doorbell when someone hit me. I was only a few minutes late, so I think I must have been out quite awhile. When I came to, there was no film.”
    “Did you see anyone around before you rang the bell?”
    “I didn’t look.”
    “Who knew you were bringing it here?”
    “Cookie. You. Everyone at Cookie’s house. But they were probably all too drunk to mug a mouse, much less a man mountain.”
    Skip gave him a furtive once-over. Hardly a man mountain, she thought, but certainly a nice, tall round fellow with a pleasant demeanor and blue eyes behind a pair of spectacles that looked as if they grew on his face.
    “Did you have it done at a lab? How about the lab people?”
    “The guy’s a friend of Cookie’s—that’s how I got him to work on Mardi Gras. I had to tell him what it was to get him to do it, and he did seem really eager—normally it would take overnight, but he did it fast, specially. In fact, he did it really fast because he wanted to get over to Cookie’s bash. He got me to give him a ride over there afterward.”
    “So he couldn’t have followed you.”
    “I don’t see how.”
    “Wait a minute. This has got to be a print,