'Today?'
'This aft, like I said. I told him to try the pawnshops. Did I do wrong? He didn't shoot somebody?'
'Not that I know of.'
'That's good.'
But he was subtly disappointed. 'If you want to talk to Mrs. Hendricks, there's a room phone beside the desk.'
I thanked him and he returned to the joys of bachelorhood. I didn't bother with the phone, or with the elevator. I found the fire stairs at the back of the lobby and went up the red lit stairwell to the second floor.
Room 27 was at the end of the hall. I listened at the door. There was faint music behind it, a country blues. I knocked. The music was shut off abruptly.
'Who is it?' a woman said.
'Harry.'
'It's about time!'
She unlatched the door and pulled it open. I walked in on her and took the doorknob out of her hand and swung the door shut behind me, in case the screaming expression on her face changed into sudden noise.
It didn't. The fixed lopsided rigor of her face didn't change. Her right fist rose of its own accord to the level of her eyes. She looked at me around it.
'Take it easy, Mrs. Hendricks. I won't hurt you.'
'I hear you telling me.'
But she relaxed enough to unclench her fist and use it to smooth her red hair. Her lopsided mouth straightened itself. 'Who are you?'
'A friend of Harry's. I said I'd look him up here.'
She didn't believe me. She looked like a woman who had stopped believing almost everything except the number on bills, the price tag on clothes and people. She was dressed in style, in a brown loose kind of half-sleeved something which showed her figure without overemphasizing it. Her forearms and legs were beautifully made and deeply tanned.
But her face was made up as if she had begun to doubt her looks, or wished to hide them. From under eyelids greener than her eyes, through eyelashes that groped like furred antennae in the air, she peered at me distrustfully.
'What's your name?' she said.
'It doesn't matter.'
'Then get out of my room.'
But she didn't really expect me to. If she had any expectations left, they had to do with possible disasters.
'It isn't your room. It's Harry's. He said he'd meet me.'
She looked around the room, at the worn carpet, the faded flowers in the wallpaper, the bedside lamp with its scorched paper shade, as if she was considering her relationship to it. Externally she didn't belong here at all. She had the kind of style that could be bought, but not suddenly, at Bullocks and I. Magnin's; the brown pouch on the bed with its gold tassels looked like Paris. But she belonged internally to the room, the way a prisoner belongs to his cell. She had done time in rooms like this, and it was setting in again.
'It's my room too,' she said. To prove it, and to cheer things up a little, she went to the bedside table and turned up her portable radio. The country blues hadn't ended yet. It had been a long two minutes.
'What-?'
Her voice screeked on the word. She was still so full of tension that she was hardly breathing. She tried to swallow the tension; I watched the marvelous mechanism of her throat. 'What kind of business do you have with Harry?' she finally managed to say.
'We were going to compare notes on Francis Martel.'
She flapped her eyelashes. 'Who?'
'Martel. The man you want a picture of.'
'You must be thinking of two other people.'
'Come on now, Mrs. Hendricks. I've just been talking to the photographer Malkovsky. You wanted him to take a picture of Martel. Your husband risked his neck trying to get one this morning.'
'Are you a cop?'
'Not exactly.'
'How do you know so much about me?'
'That's all I know about you, unfortunately. Tell me more.'
Laboriously, with hands that jerked a little, she got a gold cigarette case out of her brown pouch, opened it, took out a cigarette, and put it between her lips. I lit it for her. She sat on the bed and leaned back on her arm, blowing smoke hard at the ceiling as if to conceal its dinginess.
'Don't stand over me like that. You look as though you're going to jump down my throat.'
'I was admiring your throat.'
I pulled up the only chair in the room and sat on it.
'Swingin'.' Her voice was sardonic. She covered her neck with the collar of her fingers, and studied me. 'I can't figure you out, unless you're trying to soften me up with the sweet-and-sour treatment. Which will get you nowhere.'
'Are you really Harry's wife?'
'Yes. I am.'
She sounded a little surprised herself. 'I'd show you my marriage license but I don't seem to have it with me at the moment.'
'How can he afford you?'
'He can't. We haven't been working at it lately. But we're still friends.'
She added with a kind of rough nostalgia: 'Harry wasn't always on the skids. He used to be more fun than a barrel of monkeys.'
'And you weren't always in the chips.'
'Who told you that?'
'Nobody had to tell me.'
Your voice told me, doll, and the way you have to keep using your body in little conspicuous ways as if you were treading water. The way you looked at the room told me, and the way the room looked back.
'Are you from Vegas?' she said.
'People are supposed to smile when they say that.'
'Are you?'
'I'm from Hollywood.'
'What do you do for a living, Hollywood? If anything.'
'Private investigations.'
'And you're doing a job on me?'
Her look was fearful again. At the same time she signaled for the ashtray from the bedside table and butted her cigarette in it while I held it. She shifted her position, leaning heavily sideways with half-deliberate clumsiness to show how helpless her fine big body was. It needed no help from me, though: it was perfectly at home on a hotel bed.
'You've got things twisted around,' I said. 'I was hired to do a job on Martel.'
'Who by?'
She corrected herself: 'By whom?'
'A local man. His identity doesn't matter. Martel stole his girl.'
'It figures. He's a thief.'
'What did he steal from you, Mrs. Hendricks?'
'That's a good question. The real question, though, is whether he's the guy I think he is. Have you seen him?'
'Several times.'
'Describe him for me, will you? We may be able to get together on this.'
