I thought I recognized him, was certain I had seen him somewhere before. Put him in an office building downtown and he could pass for a prosperous doctor, lawyer or insurance salesman.
“Nice evening?” he asked when we were seated.
I said that it was, and mentioned the five dollars.
“That’s fine,” he agreed. “We like our guests to enjoy themselves. We want them to come back.”
“Indeed?” I put faint irony into it.
“Yes, yes indeed.” He chose to ignore the irony. “We have many regular guests here, ladies and gentlemen who come in several evenings a week.”
“That’s most interesting. And profitable.” I wondered when he was going to pop the question. He was merely prefacing now.
“Oh, very. We like to take the best of care of these customers, sir. A businesslike administration, you know. We like to treat them as our guests because they wish to feel that they are our guests. Mutual protection, you understand. We’ve even assigned our regular guests numbers by which they are known. Naturally, no names are ever mentioned. Each guest has his own number, his own peg. You follow me?”
I was away ahead of him. He had popped.
“Yes, indeed,” I said. “I can appreciate such thoughtfulness. It protects your regular customers from... uh, possible uncouth strangers, interlopers.”
“I perceive you anticipate my very thought, yes sir, my very thought. You can easily understand our position, of course. Why, only this evening one of our regular guests complained to me. It seems that someone very thoughtlessly used his clothing peg. Number 63. He was perturbed.”
I grinned but it was a totally mirthless grin.
“Yes — I can understand the poor man’s chagrin. I’m afraid I used his peg. I have none of my own.”
The doctor-lawyer-insurance salesman leaned over his mighty desk and smiled coolly at me.
“That, Charles Horne, is the distressing point in question.”
There was about this man, Louise, a certain chilly deadliness that banished the possibility of continued nonchalance, real or pretended. I couldn’t hold up my end of it. He both repelled and fascinated me.
The latent menace of him was overpoweringly impressive. The sheer deadliness seemed to hang in the air about him, around his chair, reach across the polished desk to me. I could feel it as distinctly as I could feel a cold wind biting the back of my neck.
He was fairly easy to classify, mentally. Here was the type of man whose stark malevolence was both cloaked and betrayed by his very quietness. Whose inner thoughts spun and grew for hours on end in absolute, unemotional silence and then, coming at last to an irrevocable conclusion, suddenly lashed out with the unexpected finality of lightning.
I was afraid of him and we both knew it.
I fumbled around in a coat pocket but couldn’t find my pipe. He anticipated me, as usual.
Still smiling frostily, he pushed across the desk a glistening, copper-plated humidor filled with expensive cigars. I took two, and put the other one in my lapel pocket.
“For after a while,” I explained.
He nodded, smoothed out a nonexistent wrinkle in his tuxedo, and almost as an afterthought handed me a long bullet casing mounted on a plastic base. It was about the size used in the army’s machine guns. The green enameled top lifted off to reveal the lighter. It worked on the first spin.
I didn’t want his continued silence, feeling myself much safer if he were talking.
“I can explain my being here,” I started the ball rolling. “It was a kind of an accident.”
“Very much of an accident,” he assured me with grim, subtle intonations. “I have investigated it thoroughly. The driver made a regrettable mistake in stopping for you. It was her initial trip but that does not excuse the error. She carried certain precise instructions. They were not followed to the letter.”
“You shouldn’t hold it against the kid,” I objected. “Anyone in the same place could have made the same mistake. I was loafing on the corner and she thought I was a regular. She talked as if I were.”
He snatched that one up quick. His fingers had been playing with his tie. Now they flew to the edge of the desk.
“You talked with her?”
He had picked it up so quick I realized I was getting the babe into trouble. Here was something the tuxedo hadn’t known.
“Huh! Talked
“I see.” But he only partially relaxed. His sensitive fingers left the edge of the desk. There would be a push button under there. “However,” he went on, “it is an error that must not be repeated. And of course we shall cease using that particular corner.”
I grinned at him but there wasn’t much mirth in it.
“Hell, mister. You needn’t worry about me shooting off my mouth. I’m not in the habit of letting it hang open.”
