Crime of Their Life by Frank Kane

wasn’t smiling, heavy lines from his nostrils ran to the comers of his mouth to imprint a triangle. The girl alongside him was easily thirty years younger, pretty in a vapid way. Her dark hair was styled in a gamin cut, the emphasis in her makeup was on her eyes, brought out their extraordinary hazel color.
    “Our other two table-mates haven’t shown up yet. Sometimes they forget to come to meals at all. They’re newlyweds, you see.” Allen looked around the table expectantly. The line always drew a laugh. He wasn’t disappointed but the laugh was beginning to sound a little tired by now.
    Liddell slid into the seat next to Mrs. Phelps, across from the disbarred lawyer. He glanced over to the captain’s table where Captain Rose was trying to disguise his impatience with the apparently interminable story a beefy man in a black silk suit was telling. To the captain’s left, Liddell recognized the fading beauty of one-time movie star Robin Lewis. Her hair was still the taffy blonde of her heyday, her lips as bright and shiny. But the lines in her face were tired, the ends of her mouth drooped and the lines that formed at the comers of her eyes were more wrinkles than crinkles. She was feigning interest in the story the beefy man was telling, but the way her eyes wandered gave her away.
    The woman on the story-teller’s other side made no attempt to disguise the fact that she had heard the story too many times even to pretend to be listening. Her blue hair was bent over her plate, she was eating with no apology to anyone. No one would have to be told she was the beefy man’s wife.
    Liddell’s inventory of the captain’s table was interrupted by the arrival of the honeymooning couple. Harry Doyle was tall, hulking, with a shock of yellow hair that refused to stay down no matter how much water he poured on it. He grinned shyly at the people at the table as he ushered his wife Belle to her seat. She was a tall, fair-skinned, big breasted, big-hipped farm girl who used no make-up, combed her long blonde hair back from her face to sit in a heavy coil on the back of her neck. They acknowledged the introduction to Liddell in low tones, quietly slid into their seats.
    “Thought you’d forgotten about eating altogether.” Jack Allen winked lewdly.
    Doyle fumbled for his fork with heavy knuckled fingers, colored slightly. “It was real hot on that island. Me and Belle we got real tired—”
    The color deepened at the guffaw this brought from the cruise director and the farm boy grinned.
    “We just figured to catch a little rest. I guess the sound of the ship woke us. I hope we didn’t delay nothing.”
    “I don’t blame you, Belle,” Martin Sands’s “niece” told the newlywed. “I thought it was awful hot on that island. I was sweat—” She broke off momentarily, recovered. “I was perspiring something fierce. I hope the other islands are cooler.”
    She wondered if anyone had caught the slip. She knew Martin did. He always winced when she used the old expressions. Despite the long and arduous training at Miss Renfield’s Secretarial School designed to eliminate the Brooklyn accent and the Brooklyn expressions, they always managed to crop up at the wrong time.
    She studied him from the comer of her eye. Aside from the fact that his mouth had lengthened into a thin, hard line he gave no sign that he had heard. For the tenth time in the six days since they’d left New York she wished she had never agreed to come.
    Helen Burns, which was her right name, had been properly impressed when Miss Renfield’s School told her she was to be interviewed for the job of secretary to Martin Ritter, vice president of Lorelei Fabrics. His office was on the 28th floor of the Textile Building on Park and 56th Street. The girl in the outer office had eyed her quizzically as she directed her down the hall to Ritter’s office.
    She had gotten the job and had been flattered when he started asking her to dinner. They stuck to the