Three days later in the shank of the afternoon Eileen Wade called me up, and asked me to come around to the house for a drink the next evening. They were having a few friends in for cocktails. Roger would like to see me and thank me adequately. And would I please send in a bill?
“You don’t owe me anything, Mrs. Wade. What little I did I got paid for.”
“I must have looked very silly acting Victorian about it,” she said. “A kiss doesn’t seem to mean much nowadays. You will come, won’t you?”
“I guess so. Against my better judgment.”
“Roger is quite well again. He’s working.”
“Good.”
“You sound very solemn today. I guess you take life pretty seriously.”
“Now and then. Why?”
She laughed very gently and said goodbye and hung up. I sat there for a while taking life seriously. Then I tried to think of something funny so that I could have a great big laugh. Neither way worked, so I got Terry Lennox’s letter of farewell out of the safe and reread it. It reminded me that I had never gone to Victor’s for that gimlet he asked me to drink for him. It was just about the right time of day for the bar to be quiet, the way he would have liked it himself, if he had been around to go with me. I thought of him with a vague sadness and with a puckering bitterness too. When I got to Victor’s I almost kept going. Almost, but not quite. I had too much of his money. He had made a fool of me but he had paid well for the privilege.
22
It was so quiet in Victor’s that you almost heard the temperature drop as you came in at the door. On a bar stool a woman in a black tailormade, which couldn’t at that time of year have been anything but some synthetic fabric like orlon, was sitting alone with a pale greenish-colored drink in front of her and smoking a cigarette in a long jade holder. She had that fine-drawn intense look that is sometimes neurotic, sometimes sex-hungry, and sometimes just the result of drastic dieting.
I sat down two stools away and the barkeep nodded to me, but didn’t smile.
“A gimlet,” I said. “No bitters.”
He put the little napkin in front of me and kept looking at me. “You know something,” he said in a pleased voice. “I heard you and your friend talking one night and I got me in a bottle of that Rose’s Lime Juice. Then you didn’t come back any more and I only opened it tonight.”
“My friend left town,” I said, “A double if it’s all right with you. And thanks for taking the trouble.”
He went away. The woman in black gave me a quick glance, then looked down into her glass. “So few people drink them around here,” she said so quietly that I didn’t realize at first that she was speaking to me. Then she looked my way again. She had very large dark eyes. She had the reddest fingernails I had ever seen. But she didn’t look like a pickup and there was no trace of come-on in her voice. “Gimlets I mean.”
“A fellow taught me to like them,” I said.
“He must be English.”
“Why?”
“The lime juice. It’s as English as boiled fish with that awful anchovy sauce that looks as if the cook had bled into it. That’s how they got called limeys. The English—not the fish.”
“I thought it was more a tropical drink, hot weather stuff. Malaya or some place like that.”
“You may be right.” She turned away again.
The bartender set the drink in front of me. With the lime juice it has a sort of pale greenish yellowish misty look. I tasted it. It was both sweet and sharp at the same time. The woman in black watched me, then she lifted her own glass towards me. We both drank. Then I knew hers was the same drink.
The next move was routine, so I didn’t make it. I just sat there. “He wasn’t English,” I said after a moment. “I guess maybe he had been there during the war. We used to come in here once in a while, early like now. Before the mob started boiling.”
“It’s a pleasant hour,” she said. “In a bar almost the only pleasant hour.” She emptied her glass. “Perhaps I knew your friend,” she said. “What was his name?”
I didn’t answer her right away. I lit a cigarette and watched her tap the stub of hers out of the jade holder and fit another in its place. I reached across with a lighter. “Lennox,” I said.
She thanked me for the light and gave me a brief searching glance. Then she nodded. “Yea, I knew him very well. Perhaps a little too well. ”
The barkeep drifted over and glanced at my glass. “A couple more of the same,” I said. “In a booth.”
I got down off the stool and stood waiting. She might or might not blow me down. I didn’t particularly care. Once in a while in this much too sex-conscious country a man and a woman can meet and talk without dragging bedrooms into it. This could be it, or she could just think I was on the make. If so, the hell with her.
She hesitated, but not for long. She gathered up a pair of black gloves and a black suede bag with a gold frame and clasp and walked across into a corner booth and sat down without a word. I sat down across the small table.
“My name is Marlowe.”
“Mine is Linda Loring,” she said calmly. “A bit of a sentimentalist, aren’t you, Mr. Marlowe?”
“Because I came in here to drink a gimlet? How about yourself?”
“I might have a taste for them.”
“So might I. But it would be a little too much coincidence.”
