One of the most important of these establishments is a delicatessen store on Seventh Avenue,[79] a notorious and popular place. The little room is crowded with things to eat and drink. Small tables are placed about the vacant places and at these tables sit owners of houses, madames and inmates, pimps, runners, and lighthouses. All the forces for the conduct of the business of prostitution in parlor houses are here, scheming, quarreling, discussing profits, selling shares, securing women, and paying out money for favors received. If the walls of this little room could speak, they would reveal many secrets. The value of houses is debated, the income from the business, the expenses of conducting it, the price of shares to-day, or to-morrow, or in the future, if this or that happens. Here is the center of the trade in certain types of houses,--the stock market, where members bid and outbid each other and quarrel over advantage given or taken. The owner of this delicatessen store, a stout and rather handsome man, moves about quietly. Upstairs, his wife, hearty and ample, cares for his home and his children. Now and then the children sit at the tables with wondering eyes and listen. The eldest girl, about seventeen, dressed in white, talks earnestly with a handsome procurer or holds the hand of a madame. In some of the places here alluded to liquor is sold without a license; in others, gambling is carried on. Poker, stuss, No. 21, pinochle, are played in the rear behind closed doors. For instance, during the month of April, 1912, a stranger entered a "coffee and cake hangout" in East 114th Street.[80] The usual crowd of pimps, crooks, and gamblers sat about the tables eating and drinking. A man rose from a table and walked to the rear to a little white door. He tapped gently; the door opened and closed behind him. As it did so, the stranger saw in an inner room men seated about a table. Elsewhere a lucrative business in the sale of drugs is carried on. Blanche, a street walker, crazy for morphine at 2.30 A. M., on May 18, 1912, pleaded with a man in a restaurant on Seventh Avenue[81] to purchase some for her. The stranger with whom she was at the time, moved to pity at her pleading, furnished the money. A bottle of morphine tablets was hastily procured from a well-known pharmacy on Seventh Avenue. Snatching the bottle from his hand, she concealed it in her stocking.[82] The cigar store, the pool room, the coffee and cake restaurant, are the favorite resorts of the pimps. Here they come to make deals for their women, to receive telephone messages from their girls on the street or in vice resorts, to plan "line ups"[83] when a "young chicken" is about to be broken into the business, and to buy drugs for their girls and themselves. It is common knowledge that here gangs are formed and arrangements for robberies or other criminal acts made; here the spoils are divided; guns are hidden when officers come to search, and men beaten who make a "squeal."