“Did you say you got a daughter?” Steve asked her. Beer had come for everybody while we waited for the food.

“Yeah. Michelle. We call her Mickey. She’s smart as a whip and cute as hell. Lives with my aunt and me. I’m a good mom.”

“I’m sure you are,” Steve said, nodding, though the only thing about her that suggested motherhood was her neckline. “I hope you’re putting your money away.”

That actually seemed to hurt her feelings a little. “Don’t take me for just another party girl. I already own a farm.”

If this doll owned a farm, bodies were buried on the back forty.

Steve said, “Oh, that’s great. Everybody needs a dream.”

“It’s not a dream! It’s real. Maybe you’d like to go in on it with me. You have a lot of money in that footlocker and suitcase, don’t you?”

Hagan and I exchanged quick looks: here it comes.

“Those are sample cases,” Steve said. “I’m a pharmaceutical salesman. Those are serum samples.”

Nobody brought up that earlier he’d been an insurance agent. Maybe because Sandy had glommed the greenback “serum” in the footlocker.

“Veterinary medicine,” Steve went on. “Animals and humans, what’s the difference?”

She smoothed some edges off herself. “Well, I want to buy a big Guernsey bull. To raise prize show cattle. If you’d buy me a bull, I would be the happiest woman on earth.”

If he bought her bull, Steve would be the biggest jackass on the imaginary farm.

“Maybe I can arrange that,” he said, with a wave of a plump-fingered paw. “Ah. Speaking of cattle.”

The steak sandwiches arrived; so did the fried chicken. The conversation slowed, most of what ensued coming from Steve, who had talked about how he was starving but only ate a few bites. What he had to say, however, was interesting.

“Johnny,” he said to the matinee-idol cabbie, “you seem like a right kind of guy.”

“Well, thanks, Steve.”

“You taxi drivers know a lot of people.”

Which was how Hagan had been able to add me to this little party.

“I know a few,” Hagan admitted.

Very quietly, Steve asked, “Can you score me some morphine?”

Like, Pass the salt.

Hagan was chewing, and obviously wondering how to respond, when Steve said, “My car was stolen, and along with it, my medicine, and all the paraphernalia that goes with it.”

And yet his “sample cases” were still in his possession.

“Look, I’m no damn lowlife junkie,” he said, with a sickly smile. “I just got hooked on the stuff when I was in the Pacific. During the war. When I was wounded. And they gave me more in the hospital, so till I can catch a breath and get some proper medical treatment.…”

“I don’t really know of any place where I can get the stuff,” Hagan said with a noncommittal shrug, “but I can ask around.”

“Good! Good. Pick up a number 25 or 26 needle, while you’re at it. You can drop us off after dinner at the Coral Court and go on home. Your missus is probably wondering about you by now.”