It’s him, all right, it’s him, and now maybe I’ve fumbled the thing, lost him again. His forehead started to get damp, and every time he’d wipe it dry, it would get damp all over again.
The phone suddenly rang, up by the cashier’s desk.
He looked around, then looked away again.
Somebody began to thump on glass. He looked around again, and the cashier was motioning him.
He went over and the cashier said, “There’s somebody on here says he wants to talk to a man sitting by himself up against the window. Now look, people aren’t supposed to get calls here at my desk—” He handed it over to him nevertheless.
It was he. “Hello, Quinn?”
“Yeah, what happened to you?”
“I’m waiting for you at a place called Owen’s. I’m at the bar there. It’s down on Fifty-first.”
“What’s the idea of doing that? You told me here first. What’re you trying to do, give me the run-around?”
“I know, but — you come where I am now. Take a cab, I’ll pay for it when you get here.”
“Are you sure you’re not kidding this time?”
“I’m not kidding. I’m in the place already, waiting for you.”
“All right, I’ll see whether you are or not.”
She paced back and forth in front of the place, grinding her fist into its opposite palm. They wouldn’t let her in any more. The sign over the entrance was out. The trashcans full of refuse were out. The last lush was out. It was dead. Dead, but not quite cold yet, still only in the process of giving up the ghost. Every few moments a solitary figure would emerge and walk away, somebody who earned a living inside. This was the five o’clock in the afternoon of the night-club workers, whose clock goes in the opposite direction to that of the rest of the world.
While she paced, picketing the place for information so to speak, she kept thinking it out. Inside there, in this place I’m doing sentry-duty before, a redhead in a light-green dress handed Graves a note earlier tonight. I’ve got the place and I’ve got the note. All right, I’ve got that much. Let’s see now. To write that note in the first place she needed a pencil and paper. Those are things that the average chippy of her kind doesn’t carry around with her ordinarily; she sends most of her messages with her eyes and hips. Maybe this one did have pencil and paper; if she did, that’s my tough luck. Let’s say she didn’t have, though. Then in that case she must have had to borrow them from somebody in there. She wouldn’t be likely to interrupt one of the dancers on the floor and ask “Can you lend me a pencil and paper?” She wouldn’t be likely to accost some pair or group at one of the tables and ask it. What’s left? The waiter at her table, if she sat at a table. The man behind the bar, if she sat at the bar. The girl behind the hat-check counter. The attendant in the powder-room.
That narrows it down to somebody who works in there.
That’s what I’m doing out here now.
Even in their street-clothes she could more or less identify them at sight as they came out one by one. This trim, pert little good-looker, emerging now modishly garbed as any of her customers, for instance, couldn’t be anyone but the checkroom girl in such a place.
She stopped short as she felt Bricky’s hand come to rest on her sleeve, and then a look of genuine surprise overspread her face at the discovery that the arresting hand was feminine for once. She even seemed a trifle frightened or guilty for a moment, as one dreading retribution, until the question had been put.
“No, it works the other way around at my stall,” she said in a fluting, baby voice. “They all take out their own pencils and use them, where I’m concerned.” She opened her handbag and dug up a fistful of assorted cards and scraps of paper bearing names, addresses, telephone-numbers.
One escaped, and she thrust it away with her foot. “Let it go,” she said, “I’ve got enough without that.” She put the rest away. “No women borrowed a pencil from me; in fact I haven’t one to lend.” She went on up the street, with a little twittering sound of diminutive feet.
This colored damsel coming out, equally modish in her turn, could only be the powder-room attendant.
“Wut kine pencil?” she answered the query aloofly. “An eyebrow pencil?”
“No, the regular lead kind, the kind you write with.”
“They doan come in there to write, honey, you got the wrong number.”
“No one did ask you for one, though, all evening long?” Bricky persisted.
“No. That’s about the one thing they left out. Come to think of it, that’s the one thing I ain’t got in there to give. You’ve give me an idea; I think I’ll get me one tomorrow night and have it in there, I might get a call for it.”
A man came out.
He stopped and shook his head. “Not at my end of the bar. Better ask Frank, he works the other end.”
Another man came out right after him.
“Are you Frank?”
He stopped and smiled and singed her with his eyes. “No, I’m Jerry, but I’m not doing anything. Don’t let the name stand in your way.”
