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I may have erred on the side of caution, because a cab or two got by me before I could get my hand up. But eventually I must have snagged one, because the next thing I knew I was riding in it. And I was tired, too, so much so that I could barely keep my eyes open.
I must have closed them. They were closed when I became aware of the cabdriver, to whom I had evidently bonded. “My frien’, my frien’,” he was saying, with a certain degree of urgency, and one of those accents that can cope with no more than one consonant at the end of a word. “My frien’, we are here. You wan’ to sleep, you mus’ go to your room.”
I didn’t see why he couldn’t leave me alone. But I sighed and opened my eyes. I leaned forward and squinted at the meter. It was hard to make out and I decided I was reading it wrong, because what I thought I saw was $3.60, and it generally costs me ten bucks plus a tip to get home, which is one reason the subway generally gets my business.
But this would have been a bad night for the subway.
I got out, leaned against the cab, got out my wallet, and found a ten and two singles. “Your meter’s wrong,” I said. “You ought to see about getting it fixed.”
He took the money, looked at the bills, then looked at me. I asked him if something was wrong. Wasn’t that enough money? Did he want more?
“Is ple
“Okay,” I said, and looked around. “Where is it? Where are we?”
“Where you say.”
“Where I say?”
“Where you say to take you. We here, my frien’. You go to your bed, okay?”
“Okay,” I said, and let go of the cab for a moment, and when I reached for it again it was gone. I got my balance, no easy task, and I turned around for a good look at my house, which I have to say didn’t look like my house at all.
Well, that might explain the low fare. The cabby, upset at having a fare sleeping in his cab, had just dropped me any old place-and I, willing to believe we’d gone all the way to the Upper West Side, had insisted on paying him accordingly.
But where the hell were we?
I straightened up and focused on the building in front of me, and either it was swaying or I was, and logic suggested the instability was mine. There was something written on the canopy, but how was I going to read it?
Definitely not my building, no matter what the driver said. And yet it did look familiar.
Was I intent on visiting a friend? This certainly wasn’t Carolyn’s place on Arbor Court, although the meter would have been about right. Some other girlfriend? I didn’t know where Alice Cottrell lived, we’d only been to my place, but maybe I’d given the driver some exgirlfriend’s address, out of force of habit. Well, force of nonhabit, since I didn’t have any old girlfriends I was in the habit of dropping in on. Force of rye whiskey, call it.
I walked up to the entrance, and it still looked familiar. I opened the door and went in, and the entranceway looked familiar, too. I looked past some chairs and couches to a fireplace, and I looked up over the fireplace, and I saw a little furry chap in a royal blue hat and a bright red jacket and boots the very color of the cab that had brought me here.
Oh.
I straightened up, and I walked a perfectly straight line over to the desk, where a round-shouldered man with the air of a defrocked accountant was reading one of Patrick O’Brian’s sea stories of the Napoleonic Wars.
“Jeffrey Peters,” I said. “Room 415. I’d like my key, please.”
CHAPTER Thirteen
I woke up eight hours later, well rested, glad to be alive, with a clear head and a feeling that all was right with the world, and if you believe that I know a bunch of really nice guys who’d love to play poker with you.
Because that’s not how it happened at all. A pair of sensations woke me, one centered an inch or so behind my forehead, the other in the pit of my stomach. My head, throbbing, alerted me that to move was to risk death, while my stomach advised me that it was about to reject what I’d been unwise enough to put into it.
I stayed right where I was, eyes clenched shut, trying to will the day away. I wasn’t sure where I was, but it didn’t feel like my own bed. And I couldn’t dismiss the awful sensation that I wasn’t alone in it.
I forced my eyes open, and another pair of eyes looked back at me from only inches away. Little shoe-button eyes, and of course it was Paddington, and that brought it all back, or at least as much as I was destined to remember, the last moment of which I’ve already told you about-marching carefully across the lobby and demanding my room key. I couldn’t recall what had happened after that, but it wasn’t hard to reconstruct, for here I was in my room.
I got up and showered and shaved. My head didn’t literally split in two, nor did I get sick to my stomach. The little kit with my shaving gear, which I’d tucked into my suitcase, held aspirin as well, and a good thing. I put on clean socks and underwear-in case of a traffic accident, or a police frisk-and the shirt and slacks and jacket I’d been wearing the day before.
The shirt and pants were on hangers, I was pleased to note, and the jacket was hung over the back of the chair. That, it seemed to me, was a Very Good Sign. If I’d had it together sufficiently to hang up my clothes, then I couldn’t have been too bad, could I?
Ah, the little lies we try to tell ourselves. Memory, the thief of self-esteem, assured me I’d been in a bad way indeed. Just because I was neat didn’t mean I’d been sober.
Just for openers, telling the cabby to take me to the Paddington had not been the act of a sober man, or even a halfway sane drunk. I had to get back to the hotel, had to figure out a way to reclaim my tools and gloves before they turned up in an evidence locker, had to get my hands on Cynthia Considine’s rubies before somebody else did.
But how? The last I’d seen of the Hotel Paddington, and it of me, I’d been wearing handcuffs and a hangdog expression. If I had to return to the scene of the crime, a bit of indirection seemed called for. Illicit entry via the basement, say. A little capering across the rooftops. I couldn’t just walk right in as if I owned the place.
But wasn’t that essentially what I had done? I’d walked in, if not like the owner, at least like a tenant in good standing. And why not? I’d paid my rent in advance, and no one had checked me out or given me my money back. If it had been Carl Pillsbury behind the desk, or if the redoubtable Isis Gauthier had been curled up on a sofa in the lobby, I wouldn’t have had such an easy time of it. But what did the nearsighted night clerk know of Peter Jeffries, or Jeffrey Peters, or whoever I’d claimed to be? Easygoing lad that he was, he’d just slapped my key on the counter without even checking the register.
Maybe my mind, freed by rye whiskey from the rigid parameters of conventional thinking, had worked all of that out for me, all in the few seconds it took me to provide the cabdriver with an address. I considered the possibility, and then reluctantly shook my head. (A bad idea, aspirin or no aspirin. The last thing my head needed was a good shaking.)
No, I hadn’t thought my way into the Paddington. I’d blundered, and come up lucky.
I picked up Paddington, and he looked none the worse for wear. Either the cops had returned him after his x-ray ordeal, which seemed unlikely, or the hotel had replaced him, which also struck me as odd. Never mind. He was here and so was I, and he could stay here but I had work to do.
I picked up my watch, and when I saw what time it was I held the thing to my ear to see if it was still ticking. It wasn’t, of course; it was digital, and had never ticked in its life. But the little seconds were passing visibly, so it was still working, and what it told me was that it was 3:37 in the morning.