“Here,” I said. “Fix yourself up. Your picture’s going to be in the papers.”
I started to toss her the lipstick.
But I didn’t.
I stood holding Jean Dahl’s lipstick.
With my thumb I pushed the top up.
I looked at it. I looked at it for almost a minute. Then I began to laugh.
I stood there for a long time holding the lipstick in my hand and laughing. Then I put the lipstick back in my pocket.
“The hell with it,” I said. “I’m going to remember you for a long time, darling. And it’ll be better if I remember you looking like this. It’ll be easier.”
I turned to Walter. “Well,” I said, “I guess I’ll be running along. I’m sure you two will have a lot to talk over. I won’t bother calling the police. You can do that. Maybe you can even fix this whole thing up. I don’t know how, but you’re pretty good at fixing things. I’ll be interested to see how it all comes out, however.”
“Richard,” Walter said. “What about our deal?”
I laughed.
“May I take it then that you are not going to publish the book?”
“I’m not going to publish your book,” I said. “I’m going to publish Anstruther’s.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I haven’t got time to go into it now,” I said. “You can read all about it in the New York Times Book Review.”
I turned, unlocked the door, and left quickly.
I sat in the bar on West Forty-eighth Street looking at the autographed picture of Martin and Lewis.
On the table in front of me were two things.
My fifth drink and Jean Dahl’s lipstick.
I looked across the room at the booth on the other side and I noticed something. A new picture.
I picked up my drink and the lipstick and moved to the booth across the way.
I had two more drinks. I drank them slowly and deliberately. Then I looked up at the picture and said, “Hey, baby, want to see something?”
I pulled the cap off Jean Dahl’s lipstick and turned it upside down. The roll of microfilm fell out in my hand. “There it is, baby,” I said to the picture. “Microfilm. No wonder Jean was willing to sell you her copy of the book so cheap. She had it all on microfilm, right here. I guess this is what Maxie’s boys were looking for in my apartment the other night. I guess a lot of things. I guess I’ll have another drink.”
Chapter Fifteen
I walked into Pat’s office two days later and (in reality, not in a daydream) casually tossed the manuscript, all three hundred and forty-seven photostated pages of it, on his desk.
“What’s this?” Pat asked.
“Oh,” I said. “A book.”
“What book?”
“The new Anstruther,” I said casually. “If we rush it into galleys we can have it for late spring.”
Pat was aghast.
“You’re drunk,” he said.
“You’re right,” I said. “But there’s the book.”
“Come back here,” he said. “Where are you going? You’re drunk. You look terrible.”
“You’re right,” I said. “And now I’m going to get drunker and look worse.”
I left the office and went for a long walk. Then I went to the movies. I spent the whole afternoon and part of the evening in the moldy theatre on Sixth Avenue, watching the movie over and over again.
Then I walked back up Sixth Avenue, stopping in each bar along the way.
The last place I went into was the one on Forty-eighth Street.
I wanted to take a last look at the new photograph.
But I was too late.
They’d already taken it down.
