Johnny, I'm sorry.'
'No problem. You want another cream soda?'
'Yes, thanks,' Georgie said gratefully.
Tell signalled the waitress.
'So he was a delivery-boy,' he said, mostly to put Georgie at his ease again - Georgie was still patting his lips with his napkin.
'That's right.' The fresh cream soda arrived and Georgie drank some. 'When he got off the elevator on the eighth floor, that briefcase chained to his wrist would be full of dope. When he got off it on the ground floor again, it would be full of money.'
'Best trick since lead into gold,' Tell said.
'Huh?'
'Nothing. Go on.'
'Not much to tell. One day he only made it down to the third floor. He made his deliveries, went into the men's room, and someone o-offed him.'
'Shot him?' Tell asked, thinking dubiously of silencers-in the movies they made a sound very like that of the pneumatic elbow-joint on the men's room door.
'What I heard,' Georgie said, 'was that someone opened the door of the stall where he was s-sitting and stuck a pencil in his eye.'
For just a moment Tell saw it as vividly as he had seen the crumpled bag under the conspirators' restaurant table: a yellow Eberhard Faber #2, sharpened to an exquisite black point, sliding forward through the air and then shearing into the startled black well of pupil. He winced.
Georgie nodded. 'It's probably not true. I mean, not that part. Probably someone just, you know, stuck him.'
'Yes.'
'But whoever it was sure had something sharp with him, all right,' Georgie said.
'He did?'
'Yes. Because the briefcase was gone.'
Tell looked at Georgie. He could see this, too.
'When the cops came and took the guy off the toilet, they found his left hand in the b-bowl.'
'Oh,' Tell said.
Georgie looked down at his plate. There was still half a sandwich on it. 'I guess maybe I'm f-f-full,' he said, and smiled uneasily.
On their way back to the studio, Tell asked, 'So the guy's ghost is supposed to haunt ... what, that bathroom?' And suddenly he laughed, because gruesome as the story had been, there was something comic in the idea of a ghost haunting a men's room.
Georgie smiled. 'You know people. At first that was what they said. When I was first working with Paul, guys would tell me they'd seen him in there. Not all of him, just his sneakers under the stall door.'
'Just his sneakers.'
'Yeah. That's how you'd know they were making it up, or imagining it, because You only heard it from guys who knew him when he was alive. From guys who knew he wore sneakers.'
Tell, who had been an eleven-year-old kid living in rural Pennsylvania when the murder happened, nodded. They had arrived at the building. As they walked up the hall toward the elevators, Georgie said, 'But you know how fast the turnover is in this business. Here today and gone tomorrow. I doubt if there's anybody working here who was working there then, except maybe for a few j-janitors, and none of them would have bought from the guy.
'And he was probably one of those guys who you never even noticed if you didn't buy from him.'
'Yeah. Unless you were a c-cop. So you hardly ever hear the story anymore, and no one ever says they see the guy. '
They were at the elevators.
'Georgie, why do you stick with Paul?'
Although Georgie lowered his head and the tips of his cars turned a bright red, he did not sound really surprised at this abrupt shift in direction. 'He takes care of me.'
Do you sleep with him, Georgie? Something else he couldn't say. Wouldn't, even if he could. Because Georgie would tell him.
Tell, who could barely bring himself to talk to strangers and never made friends (except maybe for today), suddenly hugged Georgie Ronkler. Georgie hugged him back. Then they stepped away from each other, and the elevator came, and the mix continued, and the following evening, at six-fifteen, after the wrap and Janning's curt goodbye (he left with Georgie trailing behind him), Tell stepped into the third-floor men's room to get a look at the owner of the white sneakers.
Talking with Georgie, he had remembered what he had forgotten. Something so simple you learned it in the first grade. Telling was only half. Showing was the other half.
There was no lapse in consciousness this time, nor any sensation of fear ... only that slow steady deep drumming in his chest. All his senses had been heightened. He smelled chlorine, the pink disinfectant cakes in the urinals, old farts. He could see minute cracks in the paint on the wall, and chips on the pipes. He could hear the hollow click of his heels as he walked toward the first stall.
