From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [18]
“Well, Maam,” he said politely, simultaneously aware of her awareness and his grin widening and squeezing up against his eyes to give his face a slyness, “we can sure take a look in the Orderly Room, seef your things is there. He just might of come in and gone out while I was in the Supply Room working.”
She followed him inside, although she had just come from there herself.
“Well,” he said, surprised. “They aint here.”
“I wonder where he could be,” she said irritably, half to herself. At the mention of her husband a tight unpleasant little frown cut her forehead with twin lines above her nose.
Warden waited deliberately, timing it exactly. Then he slipped it to her. “Well, Maam, if I know the Capn, him and Colonel Delbert is already up at the Club, having a few snorts, discussing the servant problem.”
Mrs Holmes turned her cold eyes on him slowly, as if he were a slide beneath a microscope. Her scrutiny knew nothing at all about Col Delbert’s stags he held up at the Club, or about his partiality to Kanaka maids.
But Warden, watching her, thought he could detect a fine faint gleam, almost of amusement behind her eyes.
“Thank you very much for your trouble, Sergeant,” she said coolly, from a very great distance. She turned and left.
“Thats quite all right, Maam,” he called cheerily. “Any time that I can help. Any time at all.”
He strolled out onto the porch to watch her climb in and drive off. In spite of her efforts a long smooth flash of thigh winked at him and he grinned.
Leva was still sitting at his desk when he went back in the Supply Room. “You been down to Mrs Kipfer’s lately, Milt?” he grinned.
“No,” Warden said. “I ain’t. How’s the dear lady gettin along?”
“Got two new girls in fresh from the States. One redhead and one brunette. Interested?”
“No,” he said. “I ain’t.”
“You aint?” Leva grinned. “I kind of thought you might want to go along with me tonight. I thought you might feel like it.”
“Go to hell, Niccolo. When I have to pay for it I’ll quit.”
Leva laughed, high up in his nose, making a sound like the spluttering of Diesel exhaust. “Well,” he said, “I just thought. Man, but that Holmes woman is one, aint she?”
“One what?”
“One woman.”
“I’ve seen better,” Warden said indifferently.
“Wonder why a man wants to go lookin for Kanaky maids when he got that at home, and with a bed too.”
“She’s cold,” Warden said. “That’s why. Cold as hell.”
“Yes?” Leva taunted. “I guess thats right. I guess thats why all these guys get tired of her. Anyway, I never seen a piece of ass yet was worth twenty years in Leavenworth.”
“Me neither,” Warden said.
“A man that fools with that stuff’s a sucker to take a chance of gettin his fingers burnt, an officer’s woman.”
“That’s right,” Warden said. “All she’d have to do, if she got caught with you, would be to holler rape and it would be Dear John, thats all she wrote.” He was looking out the door across the quad where Dog Company was toiling through its drill for stoppages. Through the truck entrance at the southeast corner showed the front half of Holmes’s house with two windows in its sidewall. That back window was the bedroom window, he had been in it once when Holmes had been changing uniforms and he had had to have him sign some papers. As he watched now he saw the car stop out in front of it and Karen Holmes climb out and walk, long-leggedly smooth and clean below the skirt, up to the porch and he remembered, now, how the other of the twin beds had looked with the woman’s shoes beneath it.
“Lets fall to on this work,” he reproved Leva. “I got that transfer comin in at nine-thirty. Also, I got a conference with Holmes and one of them goddamned complaining cooks that was scheduled for eight-thirty, but which, since Holmes aint showed up yet, will probly start at nine-thirty and last till eleven. I wont get that transfer out till noon. So if you want help, we better get on the ball.”
“Okay, Chief,” Leva grinned at him. “Anything you say, Chief.”
“And remember,” Warden said, “Mon-sewer O’Hayer says you got to straighten up thi