Yes, Siree Bob. When Fred and Edna sat at their kitchen table with their pickup cooling in the yard, as they were savoring their happily-ever-after over one last piece of pie, they could feel as proud of Dehavvy as if they’d raised her.

Knowing everything there was to know about getting his money’s worth, Jack Warner had been working Dehavvy like a horse—strapping her to a new picture every three or four months. And now the word on Wilshire was that old Jack was set to lend her out for a part in Gone with the Wind, thanks to a big fat IOU with Selznick’s name on it and a little arm-twisting by Mrs. Warner herself on Dehavvy’s behalf.

So this blonde from nowhere must have had the boys at the studios tearing their hair out. From across the room you could see that no one had a leash on her. While Dehavvy looked like she’d never seen a dance floor before, the blonde was taking things in with the narrowed eyes of a killer. She was sussing up the place and she liked what she saw. She liked the band, the tempo, the tequila—the whole shebang. If Dehavvy was bandying about with the likes of this one, then you wouldn’t have long to wait for the wrong place and the wrong time to have their tearful reunion.

•

UNBEKNOWNST TO THE SPICE Of life, the band began playing their trumpety little number for the third time. Some sort of cross between a mariachi and a rumba, this song would skip along for twenty measures and then all the boys in the band would stop on a beat and shout La Casa! before picking up where they’d left off. When they played the number for the second time, Litsky rolled his eyes with everyone else—thinking, amateurs. But when they struck it up for the third time, the crowd broke into a head-shaking grin. Maybe the gauchos were a little more soused, or maybe they were itching to showcase the steps they’d practiced in take two, because before you knew it, they had dragged their dates back on the floor and grabbed them by the hips.

Dehavvy would have been blushing, if she weren’t so busy blinking. All of twenty-two, weighing in at a hundred and one pounds with shoulder blades poking through her skin, she looked better than she had in ’37—but she was still a year’s worth of good living away from looking like a woman.

—Hey. Shorty.

Litsky looked back from the dance floor.

It was the lazy baritone behind the bar. He was drying his hands with a dirty rag.

—You gonna have a drink? Or you gonna sit there all night?

—What’s your hurry?

—That perch is for the parched.

—Yeah, yeah . . .

Litsky took a bill from his pocket and tossed it on the bar.