“You’re not a client, Mrs. Lennox.”
“I might be someday. Who knows? Let’s say to your lady friends, then.”
“Same answer. The guy was down and out, starving, dirty, without a bean. You could have found him if it had been worth your time. He didn’t want anything from you then and he probably doesn’t want anything from you now.”
“That,” she said coolly, “is something you couldn’t possibly know anything about. Good night.” And she hung up.
She was dead right, of course, and I was dead wrong. But I didn’t feel wrong. I just felt sore. If she had called up half an hour earlier I might have been sore enough to beat the hell out of Steinitz—except that he had been dead for fifty years and the chess game was out of a book.
3
Three days before Christmas I got a cashier’s check on a Las Vegas bank for $100. A note written on hotel paper came with it. He thanked me, wished me a Merry Christmas and all kinds of luck and said he hoped to see me again soon. The kick was in a postscript. “Sylvia and I are starting a second honeymoon. She says please don’t be sore at her for wanting to try again.”
I caught the rest of it in one of those snob columns in the society section of the paper. I don’t read them often, only when I run out of things to dislike.
“Your correspondent is all fluttery at the news that Terry and Sylvia Lennox have rehitched at Las Vegas, the dears. She’s the younger daughter of multimillionaire Harlan Potter of San Francisco and Pebble Beach, of course. Sylvia is having Marcel and Jeanne Duhaux redecorate the entire mansion in Encino from basement to roof in the most devastatingly dernier cri. Curt Westerheym, Sylvia’s last but one, my dears, gave her the little eighteen-room shack for a wedding present, you may remember. And whatever happened to Curt, you ask? Or do you? St. Tropez has the answer, and permanently I hear. Also a certain very, very blue-blooded French duchess with two perfectly adorable children. And what does Harlan Potter think of the remarriage, you may also ask? One can only guess. Mr. Potter is one person who but never gives an interview. How exclusive can you get, darlings?”
I threw the paper into the corner and turned on the TV set. After the society page dog vomit even the wrestlers looked good. But the facts were probably right. On the society page they better be.
I had a mental picture of the kind of eighteen-room shack that would go with a few of the Potter millions, not to mention decorations by Duhaux in the last subphallic symbolism. But I had no mental picture at all of Terry Lennox loafing around one of the swimming pools in Bermuda shorts and phoning the butler by R/T to ice the champagne and get the grouse a toasting. There was no reason why I should have. If the guy wanted to be somebody’s woolly bear, it was no skin off my teeth. I just didn’t want to see him again. But I knew I would—if only on account of his goddamn gold-plated pigskin suitcase.
It was five o’clock of a wet March evening when he walked into my down-at-heels brain emporium. He looked changed. Older, very sober and severe and beautifully calm. He looked like a guy who had learned to roll with a punch. He wore an oyster-white raincoat and gloves and no hat and his white hair was as smooth as a bird’s breast.
“Let’s go to some quiet bar and have a drink,” he said, as if he had been in ten minutes before. “If you have the time, that is.”
We didn’t shake hands. We never did. Englishmen don’t shake hands all the time like Americans and although he wasn’t English he had some of the mannerisms.
I said: “Let’s go by my place and pick up your fancy suitcase. It kind of worries me.”
He shook his head. “It would be kind of you to keep it for me.”
“Why?”
“I just feel that way. Do you mind? It’s a sort of link with a time when I wasn’t a no-good waster.”
“Nuts to that,” I said. “But it’s your business.”
“If it bothers you because you think it might be stolen—”
“That’s your business too. Let’s go get that drink.”
We went to Victor’s. He drove me in a rust-colored Jupiter-Jowett with a flimsy canvas rain top under which there was only just room for the two of us. It had pale leather upholstery and what looked like silver fittings. I’m not too fussy about cars, but the damn thing did make my mouth water a little. He said it would do sixty-five in second. It had a squatty little gearshift that barely came up to his knee.
“Four speeds,” he said. “They haven’t invented an automatic shift that will work for one of these jobs yet. You don’t really need one. You can start it in third even uphill and that’s as high as you can shift in traffic anyway.”
“Wedding present?”
“Just a casual ‘I happened to see this gadget in a window’ sort of present. I’m a very pampered guy.”
“Nice,” I said. “If there’s no price tag.”
He glanced at me quickly and then put his eyes back on the wet pavement. Double wipers swished gently over the little windscreen. “Price tag? There’s always a price tag, chum. You think I’m not happy maybe?”
“Sorry. I was out of line.”
“I’m rich. Who the hell wants to be happy?” There was a bitterness in his voice that was new to me.
“How’s your drinking?”
“Perfectly elegant, old top. For some strange reason I seem to be able to handle the stuff. But you never know, do you?”
“Perhaps you were never really a drunk.”
We sat in a corner of the bar at Victor’s and drank gimlets. “They don’t know how to make them here,” he said. “What they call a gimlet is just some lime or lemon juice and gin with a dash of sugar and bitters. A real gimlet is
