The detective had turned the corner into a side street, and Roger quickened his step, slipping on the sidewalk, regaining his balance, and then turning the corner and seeing the detective stop in front of a restaurant just short of the middle of the block. The detective stood with his hands in his pockets, his head bent, hatless, his brown hair covered with snowflakes and looking white from a distance. He was probably waiting for someone, Roger thought, and then looked around for a place where he could stop without attracting attention. That man up there is a detective, he reminded himself. He knows all about following people and about being followed, so make up your mind quick, do something. Either walk past him, or turn back, or find a place where you can hide, or pretend to be waiting, no, I'll go right up to him, Roger thought. I'll just go right up to him and tell him what I have to tell him, what's the sense of kidding around?
He was walking toward the detective when the taxi-cab pulled up, and the woman got out.
The woman was beautiful.
Roger was perhaps eight or ten feet away from her when she got out of the cab, her skirt pulling back over her knees momentarily as she slid over on the seat her hand moving swiftly to lower the skirt as she paid the driver. The detective extended his hand to her and she took it and raised her face and her eyes to his, a rare and lovely smile coming onto her face, God she was beautiful. Her hair was black, and her eyes were a very deep brown, and she smiled up at the detective with her eyes and her mouth and her entire face, and then stood beside him on the sidewalk and kissed him briefly on the mouth, not on the cheek or the jaw, but a swift sudden kiss on the mouth. She moved away from him and took his hand, her fingers lacing into his, and they began walking toward the door of the restaurant. The snow caught in her hair at once, and she shook her head and tilted her face, grinning, and he thought at first she was one of those girls who get the cutes whenever they're around a man. But no, it was something else, he couldn't quite place what it was at first. And then, as they opened the door and walked into the restaurant, he realized that the woman was simply very very happy to be with this man.
Roger had never been loved that way.
He opened the restaurant door, and followed them inside.
Abruptly, he thought of the girl Molly.
He had walked over to her table across the bar, and she had looked up at him briefly and then gone back to her drink. She was drinking something in a small stemmed glass, a whiskey sour or something, he figured. She looked up at him with disinterest, and then turned back to her drink with disinterest, as if she were equally bored with everything and everyone in the world.
"I'm sorry I stole your table," Roger said, and smiled.
"Forget it," she told him.
He stood by the table, waiting for her to ask him to have a seat, but the girl just kept looking at the open top of her glass, where some white foam was clinging to the inside, a kind of empty despair on her face, a sadness that made her look even more plain than she actually was.
"Well," he said, "I just wanted to apologize," and he started to move away from the table, thinking she wasn't interested after all, didn't want him to sit with her. And then, all at once he realized that the girl probably wasn't used to approaches from men, didn't know how to handle ' a man coming to her table and flirting with her. He stopped dead in his tracks and turned to the table again, and said, "Mind if I sit down?"
"Suit yourself," the girl said.
"Thanks."
He sat.
The table was silent again.
"I don't know why you bothered asking," the girl said, looking up briefly from her drink.
"I thought you just sat wherever you pleased."
She lowered her eyes. Her hand came out, her fingers began toying with the stem of the cherry in her glass.
"That was really a mistake," he said. "I really didn't know if anyone was sitting there."
"Mmm, yeah, well," the girl said.
"Would you like another drink?"
"Are you having one?"
"Just a beer. I don't care much for hard liquor."
"I don't, either," the girl said. "Unless it's something sweet. Like this."
"What is that, anyway?" Roger asked.
"A whiskey sour."
"That's what I thought it was." He paused. "How come a whiskey sour is sweet?"
"I ask them to go easy on the lemon."
"Oh."
"Yeah," the girl said.
"Well, would you like another one?"
The girl shrugged. "Sure. Why not?"
Roger signaled the waiter. When he came to the table, Roger said, "I'll have a glass of beer, and the lady would like another whiskey sour."
"Easy on the lemon," the girl said to Roger, not the waiter.
"Easy on the lemon," Roger said to the waiter.
"Right," the waiter said, and walked away.
"My name's Roger Broome," Roger said to her. "What's yours?"
"Molly Nolan."
"Irish," he said, almost to himself.
"Yes. What's Broom?"
"English, I think. Or Scotch. Or maybe both mixed," Roger said.
"B-R-O-O-M?"
"No, with an E"
