I went over and picked up the knife. The blade was long and round and thin, like a rat-tailed file that has been ground smooth. The handle and guard were lightweight plastic and seemed all one piece. I held the knife by the handle and gave it a quick flip at the table. The blade came loose and quivered in the wood.
I took a deep breath and slid the handle down over the end again and worked the blade loose from the table. A curious knife, with design and purpose in it, and neither of them agreeable.
I opened the door beyond the kitchen and went through it with the gun and knife in one hand.
It was a wall-bed living room, with the wall bed down and rumpled. There was an overstuffed chair with a hole burnt in the arm. A high oak desk with tilted doors like old-fashioned cellar doors stood against the wall by the front window. Near this there was a studio couch and on the studio couch lay a man. His feet hung over the end of the couch in knobby gray socks. His head had missed the pillow by two feet. It was nothing much to miss from the color of the slip on it. The upper part of him was contained in a colorless shirt and a threadbare gray coat-sweater. His mouth was open and his face was shining with sweat and he breathed like an old Ford with a leaky head gasket. On a table beside him was a plate full of cigarette stubs, some of which had a homemade look. On the floor a near full gin bottle and a cup that seemed to have contained coffee but not at all recently. The room was full mostly of gin and bad air, but there was also a reminiscence of marijuana smoke.
I opened a window and leaned my forehead against the screen to get a little cleaner air into my lungs and looked out into the street. Two kids were wheeling bicycles along the lumberyard fence, stopping from time to time to study the examples of rest-room art on the boarding. Nothing else moved in the neighborhood. Not even a dog. Down at the corner was dust in the air as though a car had passed that way.
I went over to the desk. Inside it was the house register, so I leafed back until I came to the name “Orrin P. Quest,” written in a sharp meticulous handwriting, and the number 214 added in pencil by another hand that was by no means sharp or meticulous, I followed on through to the end of the register but found no new registration for Room 214. A party named G. W. Hicks had Room 215. I shut the register in the desk and crossed to the couch. The man stopped his snoring and bubbling and threw his right arm across his body as if he thought he was making a speech. I leaned down and gripped his nose tight between my first and second fingers and stuffed a handful of his sweater into his mouth. He stopped snoring and jerked this eyes open. They were glazed and bloodshot. He struggled against my hand. When I was sure he was fully awake I let go of him, picked the bottle full of gin off the floor and poured some into a glass that lay on its side near the bottle. I showed the glass to the man.
His hand came out to it with the beautiful anxiety of a mother welcoming a lost child.
I moved it out of his reach and said: “You the manager?”
He licked his lips stickily and said: “Gr-r-r-r.”
He made a grab for the glass. I put it on the table in front of him. He grasped it carefully in both hands and poured the gin into his face. Then he laughed heartily and threw the glass at me. I managed to catch it and up-end it on the table again. The man looked me over with a studied but unsuccessful attempt at sternness.
“What gives?” he croaked in an annoyed tone.
“Manager?”
He nodded and almost fell off the couch. “Must be I’m drunky,” he said. “Kind of a bit of a little bit drunky.”
“You’re not bad,” I said. “You’re still breathing.”
He put his feet on the ground and pushed himself upright. He cackled with sudden amusement, took three uneven steps, went down on his hands and knees and tried to bite the leg of a chair.
I pulled him up on his feet again, set him down in the overstuffed chair with the burned arm and poured him another slug of his medicine. He drank it, shuddered violently and all at once his eyes seemed to get sane and cunning. Drunks of his type have a certain balanced moment of reality. You never know when it will come or how long it will last.
“Who the hell are you?” he growled.
“I’m looking for a man named Orrin P. Quest.”
“Huh?”
I said it again. He smeared his face with his hands and said tersely: “Moved away.”
“Moved away when?”
He waved his hand, almost fell out of his chair and waved it again the other way to restore his balance. “Gimme a drink,” he said.
I poured another slug of the gin and held it out of his reach.
“Gimme,” the man said urgently. “I’m not happy.”
“All I want is the present address of Orrin P. Quest.”
“Just think of that,” he said wittily and made a loose pass at the glass I was holding.
I put the glass down on the floor and got one of my business cards out for him. “This might help you to concentrate,” I told him.
He peered at the card closely, sneered, bent it in half and bent it again. He held it on the flat of his hand, spit on it, and tossed it over his shoulder.
I handed him the glass of gin. He drank it to my health, nodded solemnly, and threw the glass over his shoulder too. It rolled along the floor and thumped the baseboard. The man stood up with surprising ease, jerked a thumb towards the ceiling, doubled the fingers of his hand under it and made a sharp noise with his tongue and teeth.
“Beat it,” he said. “I got friends.” He looked at the telephone on the wall and back at me with cunning. “A couple of boys to take care of you,” he sneered. I said nothing. “Don’t believe me, huh?” he snarled, suddenly angry. I shook my head.
He started for the telephone, clawed the receiver off the hook, and dialed the five digits of a number. I watched
