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“But she recognized the other two?”
Her forefinger hovered above one of the snaps. She’d been nibbling the nail again, I noticed. “This dude,” she said, “has been around a lot. No idea when she first saw him but it was a while ago. He’s been there with Madeleine and he’s also been there alone, entering or leaving the building by himself.”
“Fascinating. What about our other friend?”
“Artie thinks he saw them together once. And Gert says he’s got a familiar look about him.”
“I’ll borrow this one,” I said, picking one up. “See you when I see you.”
The Gresham ’s lobby had changed some since Rudyard Whelkin had described it to me over the phone. Carolyn was gone and so was the shopping bag lady. There was a junkie nodding on a bench, but he didn’t look Eurasian to me. Perhaps he’d taken over when the Eurasian went off duty.
The phone Whelkin had used was in use now. An immense woman was talking on it. Too large for the booth, she was standing outside it and bellowing into the mouthpiece, telling someone that she had paid back the money, that she didn’t owe nothing to nobody. Her presumptive creditor was evidently hard to convince.
The little man behind the desk possessed a skin the sun had never seen. He had tiny blue eyes and a small and virtually lipless mouth. I showed him the picture I’d taken from Carolyn. He gave it a long and thoughtful took, and then he gave that same long and thoughtful look to me.
“So?” he said.
“Is he in?”
“No.”
“When did he leave?”
“Who remembers?”
“I’d like to leave him a message.”
He handed me a pad. I had my own pen. I wrote Please call as soon as possible and signed it R. Whelkin, not to be cute but because it was the only name I could think of other than my own. A cinch he wasn’t using it here, anyway.
I folded the slip, passed it to the clerk. He took it and gazed blankly at me. Neither of us moved. Behind me, the immense woman was a
“You’ll want to put the message in his box,” I said.
“In a while.”
Now, I thought. So I can see what room he’s in.
“I better do it soon,” he went on, “before I forget who the message is for. You didn’t put his name on it, did you?”
“No.”
“Come to think of it, who is it for?”
“You got no call to call me that,” the large woman said firmly. “A name like that, I wouldn’t call a dog by a name like that. You watch what you call me.”
The desk clerk had wispy eyebrows. I don’t suppose they’d have been equal to their God-given task of keeping perspiration from dripping into his eyes, but it probably didn’t matter because he probably avoided ever working up a sweat. He had enough eyebrows to raise, though, and he raised them now. Eloquently.
I put a twenty-dollar bill on the counter. He gave me a key to Room 311. Fifteen minutes later, on my way out, I gave it back to him.
The large woman was still on the phone. “Talk about a snotass,” she was saying, “I’ll tell you who’s a snotass. You’re a snotass, if you want my opinion.”
Back in the Pontiac, back downtown again. God, was there no end to this? Back and forth, to and fro, hither and yon, pillar to post. Interminable.
The lot on Nassau Street was still unattended. A sign informed me it was illegal to leave a car there under such circumstances. It was not an illegality I could take too seriously at the moment. Violators, the sign assured me, would be towed at the owner’s expense. It was a risk I was prepared to run.
I found a phone, dialed WOrth 4-1114. I didn’t expect anyone to answer and nobody did.
I walked down to Pine Street and east to the building Prescott Demarest had emerged from hours earlier. (Hours? Weeks of subjective time.) Now only half as many windows showed lights as had done so earlier. I wished for a clipboard or a briefcase, something to make me look as though I belonged.
The lobby attendant was dozing over a newspaper but he snapped into consciousness as I entered the building. He was an older man with a tired face, probably eking out a pension. I walked toward him, then halted in mid-stride and let myself be overcome by a coughing fit. While it subsided I checked the building directory on the wall and picked out a likely firm for myself.
“Bless you,” the old man said.
“Thanks.”
“You want to watch that cough.”
“It’s the weather. Nice one day and nasty the next.”
He gave me a knowing nod. “It didn’t used to be like this,” he said. “Weather was always something you could count on, and now everything’s changed.”
I signed in. Name-Peter Johnson. Firm-Wickwire and McNally. Floor-17. At least I wasn’t calling myself Whelkin for lack of imagination. And Peter Johnson was nicely anonymous. If Wickwire and McNally was a sizable firm, they very likely had a Peter Johnson in their employ. Or a John Peterson, or something close.
I rode the elevator to the seventeenth floor. Not that he would have been likely to check the indicator, but why be sloppy? I scooted down three flights of stairs and searched the corridors until I found a door with Tontine Trading Corp. painted on its frosted glass. The office within was completely dark, as were all the other offices I’d passed. Saturday night is the loneliest night in the week, let me tell you.
It’s also the longest and I had places to go and people to see. I put my ear to the glass, rapped smartly on the wooden part of the door, listened carefully, then popped the lock with a strip of flexible steel in not much more time than it takes to tell about it.
Office locks are often like that, and why shouldn’t they be? There’s not much point in hanging a pickproof whizbang of a lock on a door with a window in it. All you get for your trouble is a lot of broken glass.
Besides, there was a man downstairs to keep people like me from walking off with the IBM Selectrics, and what else was there to steal? I certainly didn’t find anything. When I left the Tontine office-and walked up to 17 and rode down from there-I didn’t have anything with me that I hadn’t carried into the building.
The old man looked up from his paper. “Now that was quick,” he said.
“Like a bu
CHAPTER Eighteen
“I suppose you’re wondering why I summoned you all here.”
Well, how often do you get to use a line like that? Here they all were, gathered together at Barnegat Books. When I bought the store from old Litzauer I’d had visions of little informal assemblies like this one. Sunday-afternoon poetry readings, say, with little glasses of medium-dry sherry and a tray of cucumber sandwiches handed round. Literary kaffee klatsches, with everybody smoking European cigarettes and arguing about what Ionesco really meant. I figured it would bring people around and garner the shop some useful word-of-mouth publicity. More to the point, it sounded like a great way to meet girls.
This evening’s convocation was not quite what I’d had in mind. No one was snarling in iambs or trochees. Kafka’s name had not come up. The store had already had more publicity than it needed. And I didn’t expect to meet any girls.
The only one on hand, Carolyn, was perched on the high stool I used for fetching the loftier volumes from the loftier shelves. She sat off to one side, while the rest of my guests were strung out in an irregular half-circle facing the sales counter. I myself was standing behind the counter; I didn’t have a chair to sit on because the one I usually kept behind the counter was occupied at the moment by Prescott Demarest.
See, my place was a bookstore, not a library. There weren’t enough chairs to go around. The Maharajah of Ranchipur had the best seat in the house, a swivel-based oak armchair from my office in back. Atman Singh, his spine like a ramrod, sat upon an upended wooden packing case that had held Rome Beauty apples sometime in the dim past before Mr. Litzauer used it to store surplus stock. Rudyard Whelkin had a folding chair Carolyn had brought over from the Poodle Factory.