Johnny, the roundhouse version, in a voice that even whiskey had failed to improve. A deep man’s voice growled at her to shut up and she kept on singing and there was a hard quick movement across the floor and a smack and a yelp and she stopped singing and the baseball game went right on.
I put the cigarette in my mouth and lit it and went back down the stairs and stood in the half dark of the hall angle looking at the little sign that read: Manager, Apt. 106.
I was a fool even to look at it. I looked at it for a long minute, biting the cigarette hard between my teeth.
I turned and walked down the hallway towards the back. A small enameled plate on a door said: Manager. I knocked on the door.
9
A chair was pushed back, feet shuffled, the door opened.
“You the manager?”
“Yeah.” It was the same voice I had heard over the telephone. Talking to Elisha Morningstar.
He held an empty smeared glass in his hand. It looked as if somebody had been keeping goldfish in it. He was a lanky man with carroty short hair growing down to a point on his forehead. He had a long narrow head packed with shabby cunning. Greenish eyes stared under orange eyebrows. His ears were large and might have flapped in a high wind. He had a long nose that would be into things. The whole face was a trained face, a face that would know how to keep a secret, a face that held the effortless composure of a corpse in the morgue.
He wore his vest open, no coat, a woven hair watch guard, and round blue sleeve garters with metal clasps.
I said: “Mr. Anson?”
“Two-o-four.”
“He’s not in.”
“What should I do—lay an egg?”
“Neat,” I said. “You have them all the time, or is this your birthday?”
“Beat it,” he said. “Drift.” He started to close the door. He opened it again to say: “Take the air. Scram. Push off” Having made his meaning clear he started to close the door again.
I leaned against the door. He leaned against it on his side. That brought our faces close together. “Five bucks,” I said.
It rocked him. He opened the door very suddenly and I had to take a quick step forward in order not to butt his chin with my head.
“Come in,” he said.
A living room with a wall bed, everything strictly to specifications, even to the shirred paper lampshade and the glass ashtray. This room was painted egg-yolk yellow. All it needed was a few fat black spiders painted on the yellow to be anybody’s bilious attack.
“Sit down,” he said, shutting the door.
I sat down. We looked at each other with the clear innocent eyes of a couple of used car salesmen.
“Beer?” he said.
“Thanks.”
He opened two cans, filled the smeared glass he had been holding, and reached for another like it. I said I would drink out of the can. He handed me the can.
“A dime,” he said.
I gave him a dime.
He dropped it into his vest and went on looking at me. He pulled a chair over and sat in it and spread his bony upjutting knees and let his empty hand droop between them.
“I ain’t interested in your five bucks,” he said.
“That’s fine,” I said. “I wasn’t really thinking of giving it to you.”
“A wisey,” he said. “What gives? We run a nice respectable place here. No funny stuff gets pulled.”
“Quiet too,” I said. “Upstairs you could almost hear an eagle scream.”
His smile was wide, about three quarters of an inch. “I don’t amuse easy,” he said.
“Just like Queen Victoria,” I said.
“I don’t get it.”
“I don’t expect miracles,” I said. The meaningless talk had a sort of cold bracing effect on me, making a mood with a hard gritty edge.
I got my wallet out and selected a card from it. It wasn’t my card. It read: James B. Pollock, Reliance Indemnity Company, Field Agent. I tried to remember what James B. Pollock looked like and where I had met him. I couldn’t. I handed the carroty man the card.
He read it and scratched the end of his nose with one of the corners. “Wrong john?” he asked, keeping his green eyes plastered to my face.
“Jewelry,” I said and waved a hand.
He thought this over. While he thought it over I tried to make up my mind whether it worried him at all. It didn’t
