“No, I’m telling you, Griff; no! That would be the dumb thing to do, not the smart thing. Let her chirp after we’re gone. It’s still only her word against ours. She went up there too, didn’t she? She coulda done it just as well as us. Just let’s get out of here—”
He flung open a closet-door on the other side of the room, looked in. “How about this? Let’s stuff her in here, ditch the key. It backs up against a dead wall, so she’ll never be heard. That ought to be good for plenty of head-start. It’ll be days before they get around to busting this door open—”
They lugged her across to it between them, her legs trailing after her. They thrust her inside like some sort of a mothproof garment-bag.
“Better hitch her to something,” he said, “otherwise she might try thumping against the door with her whole chassis.” He rigged up a sort of halter-arrangement of sheeting-strips, passed it under her arms, wound it around one of the clothes-hooks behind her. She was left upright, with her feet to the floor, but unable to shift out from the rear wall of the closet.
The woman said: “Can she breathe in here, in case they take some time to—?”
“I don’t know,” he answered callously. “She should find that out and tell us about it afterwards.”
They closed the door on her. A sudden pall of darkness obliterated everything. The key was withdrawn, the key that they were going to throw away somewhere outside. She could still hear them through the door, for a brief moment or two longer, making their last-minute preparations for departure.
“Got the bag?”
“What about that stew down at the desk? He must’ve seen her come up here.”
“I can handle that easy. Where’s that pint of rye I bought this afternoon? I’ll offer him a goodbye-slug across the desk. He always goes around behind the letterboxes to down a shot. You duck out while he’s back there, and make like she’s with you, talk to yourself or something.”
“What about the jig on the elevator?”
“We’ll take the stairs. We’ve done that plenty of times before when we got tired waiting for him to come up, didn’t we? The pushbutton don’t work, that’s all; he didn’t hear us ringing it. Come on, you ready?”
“Hey, I’m missing that hotel-bill. We’ve got to settle up before we can get out of here. It must have fallen on the floor somewhere around the room here—”
“Never mind looking for it now; let it go. He can make out a new one for me down at the desk—”
The outer door closed and they were gone.
Going over to the third and final place in a cab, Quinn thought he understood what was behind all this complicated maneuvering. Holmes didn’t want to walk into a trap. Therefore, to avoid one, he’d first of all moved Quinn out of the place he’d originally been in to a second place. He’d scrutinized him there unseen. But there still being no absolute surety that Quinn was alone, even though he seemed to be, he’d shifted the rendezvous to still a third place. This gave him the opportunity of being the first one on the grounds, and thereby being sure that the surroundings were sterile. To plant accomplices Quinn would have had to do it in full sight of the prospective prey.
He made it in about seven or eight minutes, no more. This Owen’s had a good deal of the look of one of the old-time speak-easies of two decades before. It was the ground-floor of a brownstone house, and you went in by the basement. It had a neon sign to blazon it, but it was past the legal closing time by now, and that was out. Most of the people were out of it too. But he jumped down and went in anyway.
There was a man sitting there in a booth by himself, facing the front. His hair was frosting around the edges, but still dark on the crown of his head. He had on rimless spectacles, and they gave him rather a sedate look. Much too sedate to be sitting by himself at a bistro around five in the morning. He looked more the type to be at home nodding over a paper under a lamp, and with the deadline set for eleven. He had on a light-gray suit, and a light-gray hat hung from a wall-hook over his table. His hand was curved around a highball, and a second one, ownerless, stood on the opposite side of the table.
As Quinn came in he unobtrusively pointed one finger upward, then dropped his hand back to the table again.
Quinn went over and stood looking down at him. He sat looking up.
There was a curious moment of abeyance, of staring without speech, rendered grotesque by their nearness to one another.
The man at the table spoke first.
“You’re Quinn, I guess.”
“I’m Quinn, and you’re Holmes.”
“How much is your taxi bill?”
“Sixty cents.”
“Here’s the money.” He let the coins flow out of a hole at the end of his hand, as thought the change were something fluid.
Quinn came back in again in a moment. He hadn’t moved, still sat there like that. Quinn stopped again where he’d been before, by the edge of the table.
Holmes gestured sketchily toward the plank-seat across from him. “Sit down.”
Quinn sat tentatively, considerably to the outside of it, away from the wall.
