“Maggie?”
No reply.
Pumo unbuttoned his heavy coat and tossed it onto one of the pegs. When he reached for the tweed cap from Banana Republic, he touched his forehead and had a sudden vision of the cap resting bottom-side up on the seat of a taxi.
He came out of the corridor into the main room of his loft and immediately saw Maggie sitting up on the platform, behind his desk, with her hands folded over the telephone. Her eyebrows were a straight line and the ruff of her live lovely hair glowed. Her mouth was closed so tightly she looked as if she had trapped some small creature within it.
“You’re drunk,” she said. “I just called three hospitals, and you were in a bar.”
“I know why he killed them,” Pumo said. “I even saw them, over in Nam. I can remember how they looked jumping out of the helicopter. Did you know, I mean do you know, that I love you?”
“Nobody needs your kind of love,” Maggie said, but even though Pumo was drunk he could see that her face had softened. The small thing was no longer trapped in her mouth. He started to explain about Martinson and McKenna and how he had met a demon in hell, but Maggie was already coming toward him. Then she was undressing him. When he was naked she grabbed his penis and towed him like a tugboat down the hall and into the bedroom.
“I have to call Singapore,” he said. “They don’t even know yet!”
Maggie slipped into bed beside him. “Now let’s make up before I remember everything I thought could have happened to you while I was waiting for you and get angry again.” She put her arms out and pulled her whole body into his. Then she jerked her head back. “Ugh! You have a funny smell. Where were you, in a burning trash can?”
“It was the demon-man,” Pumo said. “His smell soaked through from when he put his hand on my shoulder. He said hell wasn’t really so bad because you got used to it after a while.”
“Americans don’t know anything about demons,” Maggie said.
After a while Tina thought that Maggie made him feel so wickedly good that she must be a demon too. That was how she knew so much about things. Dracula had been a demon, and the man in the bar was a demon, and if you knew how to spot them you could probably see demons strolling up and down the streets of New York. Harry Beevers—there was another demon. But then the demon-things that Maggie Lah was doing to him would not let him concentrate on anything but the notion that after he married Maggie life would be very interesting because then he’d be married to a demon.
Two hours later Pumo awakened with a headache, the sweet, grainy taste of Maggie in his mouth, and the knowledge that he had left an important task undone. A well-known dread about the restaurant displaced all his other thoughts and would not go away until he remembered how he had spent the afternoon. He had to call Poole in Singapore and tell him what he had learned about the victims. He checked his clock radio: it was a quarter to eleven. In Singapore it would be a quarter to eleven in the morning. There was a chance he could still catch Poole in his room.
Pumo got out of bed and put on a robe.
Maggie was sitting on the couch, holding a pencil upright in her hand like a paintbrush and examining something she had drawn on a yellow legal pad. She looked up at him and smiled. “I’ve been thinking about your menu,” she said. “Since you’re redoing so much, why not work on the menu too?”
“What’s wrong with the menu?”
“Well,” Maggie said, and Pumo knew that she was really going to tell him. He skirted around her and went up the platform steps to his desk. “For one thing, dot matrix printing looks ugly. It makes it look as though your kitchen is run by a computer. And the paper is pretty, but it gets dirty too fast. You need something with more gloss. And the layout isn’t clean enough, and you don’t need such lengthy descriptions of the dishes.”
“I often wondered what was wrong with the menu.” Pumo sat at his desk and began hunting for the telephone number of the hotel in Singapore. “When the Mayor comes in, he likes to read those descriptions out loud. To savor them.”
“The whole thing looks like scrambled eggs. I hope the designer didn’t charge you much.”
Pumo had of course designed the menu himself. “He was amazingly expensive. Oh, here it is.”
He dialed the operator and explained that he wanted to call Singapore.
“Take a look at how much nicer your menu could be.” Maggie held up the legal pad.
“Is there writing on that pad?”
At last he was connected to the Marco Polo Hotel. The desk clerk told him that no Dr. Michael Poole was registered there. No, there was no mistake. No, there could be no mistake. There were also no guests named Harold Beevers or Conor Linklater.
“They have to be there.” Pumo began to feel desperate all over again.
“Call his wife,” Maggie said.
“I can’t call his wife.”
“Why can’t you call his wife?”
The desk clerk came back on the line before he could think how to answer Maggie’s question. “Dr. Poole and the others were staying with us, but they checked out two days ago.”
“Where did they go?”
The clerk hesitated. “I believe Dr. Poole made travel arrangements for his party through the concierge’s office in the lobby.”
The man went off to see what he could find out, and Maggie asked, “Why can’t you call his wife?”
“Don’t have my address book.”
“Why don’t you have your address book?”
“It was stolen,” Pumo said.
“Don’t be ridiculous. You’re just being nasty because of what I said about your menu.”
“For once, you’re wrong. I—”
The clerk returned and told Puma that Dr. Poole and Mr. Linklater had purchased air tickets to Bangkok, and that Mr. Beevers had booked a flight to Taipei. Since the gentlemen had not used the concierge to book hotel rooms in these cities, the clerk did not know where the gentlemen were staying.
“Why would anyone steal your address book? Who would steal anyone’s address book, for that matter?” She paused. Her eyes widened. “Oh. When you got up that time. When you told me that awful story.”
“How creepy.”
“That’s what I say. Anyhow, I don’t have Mike’s home phone number.”
“Please excuse my saying the obvious, but you could almost certainly get it from Information.”
Pumo snapped his fingers and called Information in Westchester County for Michael Poole’s telephone number. “Judy must be at home,” he said. “She has to get to school in the morning.”
Maggie nodded rather grimly.
Pumo dialed Michael’s number. After two rings, an answering machine cut in and Pumo heard his friend’s voice saying “I cannot answer the phone at this time. Please leave a message and I will get back to you as soon as possible. If you must speak to someone here, call 555-0032.”
That number must belong to one of the doctors in his group, Pumo thought, and said, “This is Tina Pumo. Judy, can you hear me?” Pause. “I’m trying to get in touch with Mike. I have some information he will want to know, and he’s checked out of the hotel in Singapore. Will you get back to me as soon as you have his new number? It’s important that I talk to him. Bye.”
Maggie carefully put the legal pad and the pencil down on the coffee table. “Sometimes you act as if women just did not exist.”
“Huh?”
“When you want to talk to Judy Poole, whose number do you request from Information? Michael Poole’s. And whose number do you get? Michael Poole’s. It never occurred to you to ask for Judith Poole’s number.”
“Oh, come on. They’re a married couple.”
“What do you know about married couples, Tina?”
