A few seconds later another voice said “Hello,” and this time it was the right one.
“You sound lovely this morning,” I said. “Who was I talking to before?”
“Oh, good morning, Mr. Hewlitt,” she said. “I wanted to talk to you about my monthly statement. It came this morning.”
“There’s somebody in the room with you.”
“Yes,” she said. “That’s right.”
“Can you get away this afternoon?”
“I really don’t think so, Mr. Hewlitt.”
“Tonight?”
“Well, that’s possible, I suppose.”
“Name a time.”
“There’s a charge for eight dollars and thirty cents here that I really don’t understand.”
“Eight-thirty tonight?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“Where?”
“Well, I’m not sure exactly. I can’t say, Mr. Hewlitt.”
“You want me to pick a place?”
“That’s right.”
“My hotel?”
A pause. Then: “I should think there would be a better way than that to handle the matter.”
I thought for a minute. “There’s a bar at Main and Utica,” I said. “Southwest corner. I’ll be there at eight- thirty. Drive by and give a honk.”
“Fine,” she said. “I’d appreciate that.”
“I wish you were here now, Joyce. I’d like to rip your clothes off and pitch you onto a bed.”
“Yes,” she said, calmly, levelly. “Yes, of course. Certainly.”
I spent the afternoon in a movie. It was a Sunday, so Rogers was probably home, and that no doubt explained why she couldn’t get away during the afternoon. The monthly statement routine had sounded a little less than brilliant to me—not too many credit managers make adjustments on Sunday morning. But that was Joyce’s problem. I had the feeling that there wasn’t anybody in the room with her anyway, that she was just exercising a talent for melodrama.
The movie was dull. I walked out somewhere in the middle of the last reel and went across the street to a lunch counter. I had a hot pastrami sandwich on rye and a cup of black coffee. The check came to eighty-five cents or so. I left a quarter on the counter for the waitress, then carried my check to the cashier. I gave her a ten and she handed me my change.
The rest was almost reflex. My fingers tucked the five down and held it so that it stayed out of sight while my palm was up. It all happened in one quick movement while I was reaching with my other hand for a toothpick. Then I picked through my change and told the frayed blond cashier that she had made a mistake—I had given her a ten and she was five bucks short. She stared at the bills and coins in my hand, then at the fresh ten on the register. She shrugged her bony shoulders in puzzlement and gave me another five. I stuffed everything in a handy pocket and stepped outside.
Cheap, I thought. Cheap and shabby. I walked back to the hotel and picked up the car and tried on the way to figure out why I’d picked the girl for an extra five dollars. I didn’t need the money. Maybe my action had been force of habit. Maybe I had been showing off to myself, proving how much faster the trained hand is than the untrained eye.
I left the car on the avenue and found the bar where I was supposed to wait for Joyce. It was a block from Daniels’ office and I’d had a drink or two there one day after a particularly bad session of drilling and grinding. That had been in the afternoon. Now it was early evening and the place was worse than I remembered it. There were a few embryonic derelicts drinking cheap wine and a few young punks getting high from the smell of the beers in front of them. I ordered a bottle of beer and got a cigarette started.
At eight o’clock I started watching the street. I watched for the full half hour. Then a Caddy convertible pulled up at the curb and she hit the horn, right on schedule. I scooped my change from the bar top and left half my beer as a tip. I figured it would be served up as a glass of draft in that kind of saloon.
The Caddy’s door was open. I hopped in, yanked the door shut. She drove a block, made an illegal U-turn and headed uptown.
“I ought to have a trenchcoat,” she said. “I feel like something out of a movie.”
“A bad movie.”
“A vehicle for a shining young starlet,” she said. Her hand left the wheel and went to her hair. “You could tell me how beautiful I look, Wizard.”
“I thought I was Mr. Hewlitt.”
She laughed easily. “Sue was in the room. She was the one who answered the phone.”
“The one who calls you Joyce?”
“She couldn’t call me mother. I’m a hot ten years older than she is. The little bitch hates me, Bill. I’m cast as the wicked stepmother in her little playlet. Jennie isn’t so bad. She’s the younger one. She thinks I’m wonderful because I’m pretty and I dress well and I have bigger breasts than she does.”
“That last doesn’t surprise me.”
“Is that as close as you can come to a compliment?”
I told her I’d do better when we turned into a motel. She said we weren’t going to a motel, Murray was home, she only had an hour or so. I asked her where we were going and she said something about a gin mill where we wouldn’t run into anybody she knew. We stayed with Main Street, turned after a mile or two, and wound up at a little neighborhood tavern just inside the city line. A bar, a television set, a jukebox, three booths. We took the last booth. The juke was unplugged and the television set was tuned to Ed Sullivan. The bartender was watching the show. There were two beer-drinkers in the place and that was all. The bartender glanced our way. I asked for Cutty Sark on the rocks for both of us. He didn’t have any. I tried him on Vat 69 and Peter Dawson and he didn’t have those fellows either. We settled on Black and White. He brought it over and Joyce and I touched glasses and drank. Most of her scotch disappeared on the first swallow. She shivered a little, then let out a sigh. I asked what was wrong.
“Nothing,” she said. “Or everything. I don’t know. Why did you have to come to this city, Wizard?”
“I blew a tire and went off the road.”
“We all went off the road,” she said. “Ages ago. I couldn’t sit still after I spoke to you on the phone. I was all jumpy and nervous, and then Murray got home from some committee meeting out at the club, and I had to sit around, make small talk and let him pat my behind and kiss my neck and put his big hands on me. I never minded it that much before. I could turn myself off, and now and then I could sell myself on the idea that we were in some kind of love.”
She finished the rest of her drink and made rings on the table with her empty glass. I lit two cigarettes and gave her one. Her fingers brushed my hand as she took the cigarette and it happened again just as it had happened in my room at the Panmore. This was not somebody else’s wife sitting across the table from me. This was a woman.
“Bill, I’ve done some rotten things—”
“To hell with that.”
“Let me finish. I’ve done rotten things. I’ve been around. I’ve been all over the map. But I can’t lay two men at the same time, one for love and one for money. I don’t groove that way. I couldn’t wait to get out of that house tonight. I can’t stand the idea of going back to it.”
“Then don’t.”
“Uh-huh,” she said.
“Don’t,” I said. “We’ll take the car and go away. We won’t come back.”
Her eyes were on the empty glass. Not empty; ice cubes were busy melting in it. She didn’t say anything for a few minutes and when she spoke her voice was low and hard.
“For two months,” she said. “Maybe three. Until we hit a hard time and I remember how easy it was to do nothing and live high. We couldn’t make it without money, Wizard.”
