Another screwball. That made three in one day, not counting Mrs. Murdock, who might turn out to be a screwball too.
I waited while he took his dark glasses off and polished them and put them on again and gave the neighborhood the once over again. Then he said:
“I figured we could maybe make a deal. Pool our resources, as they say. I saw the guy go into your office, so I figured he had hired you.”
“You knew who he was?”
“I’m working on him,” he said, and his voice sounded flat and discouraged. “And where I am getting is no place at all.”
“What did he do to you?”
“Well, I’m working for his wife.”
“Divorce?”
He looked all around him carefully and said in a small voice: “So she says. But I wonder.”
“They both want one,” I said. “Each trying to get something on the other. Comical, isn’t it?”
“My end I don’t like so well. A guy is tailing me around some of the time. A very tall guy with a funny eye. I shake him but after a while I see him again. A very tall guy. Like a lamppost.”
A very tall man with a funny eye. I smoked thoughtfully. “Anything to do with you?” the blond man asked me a little anxiously.
I shook my head and threw my cigarette into the sand jar. “Never saw him that I know of.” I looked at my strap watch. “We better get together and talk this thing over properly, but I can’t do it now. I have an appointment.”
“I’d like to,” he said. “Very much.”
“Let’s then. My office, my apartment, or your office, or where?”
He scratched his badly shaved chin with a well-chewed thumbnail.
“My apartment,” he said at last. “It’s not in the phone book. Give me that card a minute.”
He turned it over on his palm when I gave it to him and wrote slowly with a small metal pencil, moving his tongue along his lips. He was getting younger every minute. He didn’t seem much more than twenty by now, but he had to be, because the Gregson case had been six years back.
He put his pencil away and handed me back the card. The address he had written on it was 204 Florence Apartments, 128 Court Street.
I looked at him curiously. “Court Street on Bunker Hill?”
He nodded, flushing all over his blond skin. “Not too good,” he said quickly. “I haven’t been in the chips lately. Do you mind?”
“No, why would I?”
I stood up and held a hand out. He shook it and dropped it and I pushed it down into my hip pocket and rubbed the palm against the handkerchief I had there. Looking at his face more closely I saw that there was a line of moisture across his upper lip and more of it along the side of his nose. It was not as hot as all that.
I started to move off and then I turned back to lean down close to his face and say: “Almost anybody can pull my leg, but just to make sure, she’s a tall blond with careless eyes, huh?”
“I wouldn’t call them careless,” he said.
I held my face together while I said: “And just between the two of us this divorce stuff is a lot of hooey. It’s something else entirely, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” he said softly, “and something I don’t like more every minute I think about it. Here.”
He pulled something out of his pocket and dropped it into my hand. It was a flat key.
“No need for you to wait around in the hall, if I happen to be out. I have two of them. What time would you think you would come?”
“About four-thirty, the way it looks now. You sure you want to give me this key?”
“Why, we’re in the same racket,” he said, looking up at me innocently, or as innocently as he could look through a pair of dark glasses.
At the edge of the lobby I looked back. He sat there peacefully, with the half-smoked cigarette dead between his lips and the gaudy brown and yellow band on his hat looking as quiet as a cigarette ad on the back page of the Saturday Evening Post.
We were in the same racket. So I wouldn’t chisel him. Just like that. I could have the key to his apartment and go in and make myself at home. I could wear his slippers and drink his liquor and lift up his carpet and count the thousand dollar bills under it. We were in the same racket.
7
The Belfont Building was eight stories of nothing in particular that had got itself pinched off between a large green and chromium cut rate suit emporium and a three-story and basement garage that made a noise like lion cages at feeding time. The small dark narrow lobby was as dirty as a chicken yard. The building directory had a lot of vacant space on it. Only one of the names meant anything to me and I knew that one already. Opposite the directory a large sign tilted against the fake marble wall said: Space for Renting Suitable for Cigar Stand. Apply Room 316.
There were two open-grill elevators but only one seemed to be running and that not busy. An old man sat inside it slack-jawed and watery-eyed on a piece of folded burlap on top of a wooden stool. He looked as if he had
