Chapter 9

Thursday, June 26th, 1947, 2:00 p.m.

The sky was dark when I woke up. It was only the middle of the afternoon, but there were storm clouds settling in and it looked like Los Angeles was going to get one of its rare summer thunderstorms. It was about darn time: The humidity had been teasing the city for the better part of three days.

I turned on the radio and half-dozed, letting the news and weather ramble through the bedroom. My brain was thrilled to be less foggy than it probably should have been, but my belly was much less thrilled. It was still dealing with my night-before indulgences. I needed coffee and aspirin. The Doc said aspirin wasn’t good for my stomach, but when it was in one of its moods, aspirin made it feel better.

Greenstreet curled up next to my face and swished his massive tail in it: He wanted his litter changed. I grunted at him; he mewed back: a demand. He swished the tail again and, when I didn’t immediately move, whacked me with it. I opened my eyes. The cat was staring at me. I growled. He growled back. I got up and changed the litter.

The radio switched to music; I cut it off at the first sweeping chord. Then I put the phone back on the hook. It rang immediately. I waited till it stopped and took it off again, swallowed three Bayers dry, and while the coffee perked I shaved, got dressed, fed Greenstreet, and turned the radio back on. It looked like the cat was gonna have another lonely day: I had places to go and people to see.

And one place and person in particular.

* * *

The Hotel Niagara, like a lot of older Los Angeles, had seen better days. In its heyday it was a showpiece of the Jazz Age, its deco facade the same bright platinum as the hair of its most famous regular, Jean Harlow—the godmother of Bugsy Siegel’s daughter Millicent—who, at sixteen and still known as Harlean Carpenter, had spent her first wedding night there in what was now called the Harlow Suite. (Still the hotel’s nicest room, the suite was often occupied by curiosity seekers whose taste for the morbid rivaled the recent newspaper-buying public’s: Stoker Thompson told me his sales had almost doubled since Bugsy hit the front page.) Harlow spent her nights at the Niagara speakeasy (when she wasn’t at home at the Chateau Marmont) in the company of other stars and would-be stars who called the hotel their home-away-from-home. The end of Prohibition had dimmed its dazzle, and the rest of the Depression had all but darkened its doors.

Now the hotel was just another half-empty middle-class residence that catered to more or less permanent guests—mostly has-beens and never-weres, and a few starlets who wanted to board their bodies in a place almost shouting distance from the studios where they boarded their dreams, but couldn’t afford the posher buildings that had sprung up, especially after the war. Occasionally it drew visitors from everywhere who sought accommodations based on its reputation and didn’t ask in advance about its current condition. Most of them stayed there once.

Fritz Lorre had been at the Niagara for twenty years and had managed it for the last fourteen. In that time he’d rubbed shoulders with the rich and famous when they were crowding around the hotel’s pool (which had been emptied years ago) and the tables of its posh restaurant (long closed—now most of the residents ate their meals at Clifton’s Cafeteria, a few blocks away on South Broadway). Now he mingled with the aging, once-almost-famous (but never rich) who comprised the bulk of its resident population. Like so many of them, he’d come to L.A. with Aspirations. And, also like so many of them, they had been squashed: He was deemed too short and too squat for the silents and too “German” for the early talkies. Besides his thick accent (which, despite his efforts to rid himself of it, especially during the war, had remained pronounced and unmistakable), it didn’t help that he’d been arrested for embezzlement. That was how he’d met me. I was a then-fledgling private eye. I uncovered the truth that exonerated him: It was Lorre’s boss, one Peter Lang, who’d skimmed the funds. Lorre had gotten his job back (and, a few months later, Lang’s job as manager) but never his reputation. It was, he said, like he was “valking arount vit’ a big ‘E’ paintet on my beck.”

Fritz lived in a suite on the second floor, and when I’d called the night before, he’d been only too glad to accommodate. “Enytime,” he said. “I vill be glat to help.” He would personally prepare the Harlow Suite: place a bucket of ice, a bottle of bourbon (in my honor, and in lieu of the usual champagne), and two crystal tumblers on a silver tray on the cedar chest at the foot of the canopied four-poster, and foil-wrapped pieces of Belgian chocolate on both pillows. They were still considered a luxury, though they’d been available again since the end of the war in Europe. I told him to forget the bourbon—I wouldn’t be staying there—but he insisted: Perhaps I’d stop by and want a drink. “Robert Grahame,” he told me, “ent eny frient of Robert Grahame’s, vit’out kvestion, is going to get the royal treatment.”

Lorre rarely worked the desk himself anymore, but he’d promised to be at it when Lizabeth checked in. “No rekvest,” he said, “vill be too larch or too small.”

I walked to the hotel, carrying my raincoat and an umbrella. It was a long walk but it helped my stomach, and it cleared whatever cobwebs were lingering in my head. It also gave me the usual chance to think, although the things I thought about on the way weren’t the usual ones: Nine spent bullets were on my mind. So was Lizabeth Duryea, and the thoughts I was having about her weren’t very pleasant ones. I was mad, and I was working on trying not to show it: Sure, you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar, but at the moment I was low on sweetness and loaded with acid. She had a lot of explaining to do; I planned to be all ears.

* * *

The rain still hadn’t hit when I got there around four, but the sky looked more pit than picturesque and now and then thunder was rumbling. The desk clerk was a French guy named Jacques. Fritz had a soft spot for foreigners, being one himself. Jacques looked like he’d spent too many years in the Resistance; his skin was zombie-pale, and he was thinner than your average gruel. He called Lorre, who came down right away, wiping crumbs off his mouth. “Robert,” he said, and gave me a big hug. “I vas just hafing tea. Come, join me. There are freshly baked pflaumenkuchen,” he said seductively. I said no, thanks. Plum cakes are too sweet, even as breakfast, and I wanted to do what I needed to do.

He said he’d asked Lizabeth whether she wanted her coat cleaned and, seeing as she had no luggage, offered to send out for fresh clothing first thing in the morning. She’d declined both offers but thanked him, asked about the heating system (he assured her: The cooling system was working very well), and, in his company, went upstairs, where—to his amazement but per her insistence—he shut the air-conditioning off.

No one had heard from her since. The “Do Not Disturb” sign still hung from her doorknob, the maid had complained—again—an hour ago, and it was the middle of the afternoon! She hadn’t asked for food, either, or more ice or anything else—“Not’ing vatsoeffer, except to make some phone calls,” he said. There’d been about a dozen of them, all to my home or my office, except one. She’d made that a few minutes before I arrived and was still talking. Jacques wrote down the number; I didn’t recognize it—it wasn’t the number Lizabeth had given me for Dan Scott—and put the slip of paper in my jacket pocket.

* * *

The boy took me up on the elevator, unannounced since Lizabeth was still on the phone. He was tall and blond and apple-cheeked and well-built, and he couldn’t have been a day over seventeen. His name tag read “Tab.” I wondered if he was one of the starstruck dreamers, kids who came to L.A. daily in droves and would end up running elevators, or serving hamburgs and Cokes on roller skates, until they got tired of dreaming and went home to Topeka or Trenton or Tallahassee. He whistled something tuneless on the way up and announced “Seven” with professional good cheer when we stopped.

I walked down the gold-and-black-stripe-wallpapered hallway to 711: the lucky-numbered Harlow Suite. I saw the “Do Not Disturb” sign and was about to ignore it. Then I heard a voice inside: Lizabeth Duryea’s. I put my ear to the door and listened.

“. . . been trying to telephonick him all—” she was saying. She sounded like it was urgent. “I’m sorry! I forget. I’ve only been here a few days, you know I’m not use’ to— . . . Yes. . . . Yes. . . . I do know. . . . I keep trying. But I don’t want to leave here in case he— . . . For the tenneth time, they haven’t call’ me. . . . He hasn’t tol’ them, I sup—”

I knocked. She muttered something else I didn’t hear, then called, “Who, who is it?”—suddenly tentative.

“It’s me,” I said.

She said something else, quickly and quietly. It sounded like “Rion mlif.” I put my ear back to the door. I was glad the Niagara wasn’t the Desmond or one of the other big hotels on Sunset Boulevard. Their doors were a lot thicker. She added “All right, I will! But hurry” in the same hushed voice. There was a brief silence. I heard the receiver clatter into its cradle; then she cleared her throat. “Ro— Robert?” she asked, fearfully.

“Yeah,” I said.

“I— I’ll be right there.”

I couldn’t hear footsteps. I’d never stayed at the Niagara, but I’d been inside its rooms a few times. New carpet had been installed a couple years ago, and that was one of its best features. Thick dark-brown wool, the kind your bare feet bounced on, that muffled sound and wouldn’t show stains. I took a deep breath and counted to ten. Lizabeth had stopped moving. I let the breath out and coughed.

“Hurry up,” I called, and knocked again.

“All right.” I barely heard her coming toward the door. Then it opened. I walked in. I looked around the room. It was empty. All the doors—both closets, the bathroom, the one to the small sitting room—were open. The bed looked like it hadn’t been slept in. The entire suite, which was the size of my apartment, seemed unoccupied and unused. She closed the front door, walked past me, and sat on the bed. She was wearing her gloves and her coat, and it was buttoned. All the way to the top.

* * *

My apartment had been hot. This was like an oven in Death Valley an hour before Thanksgiving dinner. I wished I’d called: I could have met her someplace cooler. Not that she would have liked that. Despite the coat, she looked not only comfortable but beautiful: Her eyes sparkled; her face and hair glowed. There wasn’t a drop of perspiration on her. Anywhere that was visible, anyway.

“Hello, Miss Duryea,” I said, and loosened my tie. I thought about dispensing with it altogether: Fifteen minutes in here and I’d be wet head to toe. It might take twenty minutes without the tie.

She laughed a little nervously. “I—thought you were going to call me Lizabeth.”

I dropped my hat, coat, and umbrella on the bed. “And I thought you were going to tell me the truth,” I said, and decided the tie had to go, too. I pulled it off and added it to the pile. I left the suit jacket on; the Colt was in its holster underneath.

“I—have.” She half-smiled.

I didn’t. “Oh yeah? When?” I helped myself to a chair, some sort of slick gold-and-black-striped fabric with cut-out oak arms. It was large and comfortable. “When you told me you’d never been to New York? Or that Venus was—how far away?”

“One hundre’ seventy-two thousan’, five hundre’ thirty-eight million miles,” she said.

“That’s right. Give or take.”

She looked wary. I could understand why. Stanwyck says I look angry when I don’t smile. She’s probably right. But sometimes I look that way because I feel that way. Like when my secretary gets killed. “Woul’ you like . . . a drink?” she asked. “Mr. Lorre left this.” She pointed at the still-sealed bottle of bourbon on the silver tray.

I shook my head. “Thanks,” I said, “but I haven’t had my breakfast yet.”

“Or perhaps you’d like . . . something else?” She unbuttoned the coat, slowly, shivering a little as she did. It reminded me of the time I’d seen Gypsy Rose Lee: all tease, no strip. The spangled dress beneath shimmered and clung to her like fresh gold paint to a pair of silk pajamas.

“Just the truth.”

“I’ve told you the truth, Rob—”

I don’t lose my temper easily, but that flicked the switch. “You told me a load of horse manure!”

“No, I—”

“No, you what!” I got up and grabbed her arms and held her tightly, a foot from my face, and looked at her. Hot as it was, I felt like ice. Lizabeth looked back, her blue-gold eyes open and frightened but still hypnotic. Inch by inch, she brought her face toward mine, lips first. She closed her eyes.

That was her mistake. I’d started to lean my face in as well. I froze and kept her at arm’s length. She opened her eyes again and looked at my hands, one, then the other. I eased my grip and she slid out of it.

I looked around the room again, more so I didn’t have to look at her than because I expected to see anything or anyone. Nothing had changed. I walked over to the closets, the bathroom, the sitting room and peeked into each one. Empty. I opened all the drawers of the bedroom dresser and the desk in the sitting room. I opened the drawer of each bedside table. They were empty, too, except for a Gideon Bible and a telephone directory. I walked back to Lizabeth. She had rebuttoned her coat but was still standing in the middle of the bedroom. “Who were you talkin’ to?” I asked casually.

“Talking to?”

“When I got here. It doesn’t look like there’s anybody else here, so it must have been somebody on the ‘telephonick.’”

“No one. I was—”

I grabbed her arms again, and this time I shook her. “I checked with Fritz. His book says you made a dozen calls since you checked in, all but one to my numbers—the one I heard you talkin’ to before I knocked!” I took a breath but held on to her. She didn’t try to get away. “I’ve got friends at the telephone company, Miss Duryea,” I lied. “I can find out on my own. But I’d rather you told me.”

She said nothing but looked at my hands again. Her eyes swelled. “Are you going to hit me—too?” she said softly. I took another breath. Then, slowly, I let her go. She rubbed her arms. “Thank you, Robert,” she said. She hugged her arms around me, with her cheek to my chest, and whispered, “Please, I nee’ your help. I nee’ . . . you.”

“You want me to help you?”

“Yes, I do. I . . . don’t know what to do, and I’m fearful.”

“I bet you are.” I laughed and pulled away from the embrace. “Poor helpless Lizabeth, huh. Afraid of everyone and everything. Except a gun, of course.”

“I tol’ you, Dan gave it to me, there were no bullets in it, I just—”

“Yeah, yeah, you told me.” I sat down again. It was a way to keep from losing my temper again and doing what I’d have done if she’d been a man. “There were no bullets in it when you showed it to me,” I said, my voice strained. “But maybe you did find some, and you had them, say, last night, right before you called The Pickup. And maybe you had some Friday night, too, say, oh, around ten thirty—maybe nine of them. Or did Dan give you the gun afterward?”

“After . . . ?”

“Come on, Lizabeth. You want me to help you, you gotta let me do my job.”

“Which is . . . ?”

“Find Dan,” I said reasonably. “Protect you. And protect the package. That’s what you hired me to do, isn’t it?”

“Dan’s here. You know that.”

“Uh-huh. But neither of us knows exactly where, right?” She nodded slowly. “And I’m still protecting you and the package.” Another lie. At least the part about the package.

She looked worried. I figured she should be. I was willing to bet the bullets in it had come out of her gun. I hadn’t told Stanwyck where they’d come from, but—client privilege or no client privilege—I’d given her forensic folks the nine little bullets and I’d give them the chance to test the gun that went along with that theory, if I could. It might not be the most ethical thing to do, but then neither is killing someone, and covering up a murder isn’t part of the bargain when you hire me. Like I said, I don’t like lying. Little white lies are bad enough, but big black ones are out of the question.

“You . . . don’t have to protect that anymore,” she said. “You can give it back to me.” She sat on the foot of the bed, an arm’s length away, and looked at me. Her eyes pleaded better than her words.

But not well enough. I shook my head. “But if I did that, I’d have to return some of your money. Maybe some of Dan’s money, too. Just to keep my reputation for honesty intact.”

“I’m what has to be protect’. You can keep the money. I have some more.”

“That’s right, you do. Ten or twenty thousand dollars.” I wiped the sweat off my face; more began to collect. “Y’ know, you oughta put that in a bank.”

“I . . . don’t trust banks.”

“Yeah, my father didn’t either. At least not after nineteen twen—” I stopped and thought a split second. Then I said, “I mean, after 1936. You remember ’36, don’t you. I mean, even if you weren’t in America yet, you must’ve heard about the big stock market crash? Everybody jumping out of buildings?”

She screwed her face. “I—of course.”

“And you probably heard something about Landon beating Roosevelt, too,” I went on. “That was news all over the world.”

She nodded. “I think so.”

I nodded, too. “Of course, you were just a little girl, you probably didn’t pay much attention to boxing.”

Lizabeth looked down uneasily. “No,” she acknowledged. She glanced up, then stood and moved to a window, pulled back the curtain, and stared out.

I followed her and held the drape. There wasn’t much traffic. A few people were hurrying along the street, looking up at the sky. It was still threatening. I heard a rumble of thunder. “Nothing there but storm clouds, sweetheart. And it’s a little early, and a little dark, for the Evening Star, don’t you think?”

“I think it’s going to rain,” she said.

“Uh-huh.”

“I don’t like rain. It feels very—cold. And lonely.”

“You oughta get used to being in a lonely place, lady. It’s gonna feel a lot colder and lonelier in a jail cell, Miss Duryea, ’specially when you’re about to walk that last mile and you’re waitin’ for them to—”

I felt something hit my head. Then I blacked out.

* * *

This time when I woke up it was dark and noisy: Rain and hail were coming down fast and furious. My head felt like they’d been pummeling it for the last hour and the hailstones had been the size of bowling balls. A post-excess-bourbon trauma just didn’t compare.

Luckily, I always carried aspirin in case my stomach rebelled. I swallowed three and sat for a few minutes, then made a quick check of the rest of me. My holster was empty. That was okay: I had another gun at home. I preferred the Colt, but I could make do with the Smith and Wesson for the time being. The slip of paper with the phone number Lizabeth had called was missing, too. It didn’t matter. Fritz had it in his log, and I remembered it, anyway. I would look it up later, but I was willing to lay a sawbuck it was connected, somehow, to Dan Scott.

Other than that, I seemed intact. Nothing was bleeding, anyway.

I looked at my watch. Seven. I’d been out nearly three hours. I had no idea who’d sapped me, but whoever it was had known what he was doing. I waited until the aspirin started to kick in, then went into the bathroom and washed my face with cold water. My face looked okay. I couldn’t see the bump on my head, but I felt it. I was sure I was going to keep feeling it for quite a while to come.

I took a quick look around the suite. Lizabeth was gone. So was whoever had hit me. I thought about opening the bourbon and taking a long swallow, but that seemed like a bad idea on an empty stomach.

I sat on the bed, picked up the phone. When Jacques asked if he could help me, I gave him a number to dial. He did. When it answered, I asked for Stanwyck. She agreed to meet me at the Criss Cross in an hour. There were places that were closer, but I couldn’t think of one at the moment, and the Criss Cross was a familiar haunt: Stanwyck and I had spent more than a few late nights eating Ed Hopper’s sundees.

Right now, though, I wanted my breakfast.

* * *

I waited a while for my head and the weather to ease up. Fortunately, the hail stopped. The rain kept falling, but by the time I left the hotel, it was just a steady downpour and things were cooler. Not cool but not the middle of a Turkish bath, either. That would be tomorrow.

On the way down I asked Tab if he’d dropped anyone else on seven that afternoon. He scratched his blond head and said he thought so, but he didn’t remember; it had been awful busy. He did remember taking down the girl in 711. “A real looker,” he said, “but kinda—strange. Her clothes?”

I said, “Yeah, I know what you mean. Was she by herself?”

He scratched his head again and said, “I think so.”

I sighed and nodded. “Thanks.”

He said “No problem” and flashed a smile that must have cost his parents a thousand bucks.

All the taxis were occupied and traffic was awful—even the streetcars were crawling—so I walked. I passed cops in shiny black rubber boots and rain slickers, who weren’t used to trying to direct traffic in the rain, trying to direct traffic, and motorists trying to splash through because they weren’t used to trying to drive in the rain. L.A. thrives in good weather. Give it a storm, even if everyone is expecting it, and everyone gets confused about where they’re going and how to get there.

It only took me half an hour. My head still throbbed. The rain helped clear it. I was getting tired of it needing to be cleared.

The rain stopped just before I got to the diner, but I was good and soaked despite the coat and umbrella. I probably looked like a muskrat that’d tried to swim across Lake Michigan. I opened the door just after eight. Like it had been last night, the place was empty, but for once the radio was off. Ed sat behind the counter reading a paper and smiling: probably the funnies; he loved Smilin’ Jack, especially the chicken eating Fatstuff’s buttons as they popped off his shirt. I liked that, too.

Stanwyck was in a booth, staring at a coffee cup. She never remembered, either, until she tasted it. Bad as it was, I needed something now, and I hated the taste of tea even more than Ed Hopper’s java. The truth was his wasn’t all that much worse than it was in a lot of the twenty-four-hour diners in L.A. I’d eaten in most of them. Regularly scheduled meals aren’t part of a PI’s routine. Dinner is at three a.m. more often than six o’clock at night, and eight-in-the-evening breakfasts, like now, were nothing new either.

She looked up as I walked in and shook her head. “And I thought you looked bad last night.”

“Nice to see you again, too,” I said, and hung up the umbrella and my hat and coat and let them drip on Ed’s nice dry floor. “Hey, Ed,” I called. “Couple slices of toast with a sliced hard-boiled egg between ’em. With some lettuce and mayo.”

“Sure thing, Mr. Grahame. Comin’ right up.”

“And coffee,” I added. “Thanks.” I sat across from Stanwyck and wiped my face with a napkin. One didn’t do the trick, so I wadded up three or four and tried again. That dried my face, but I’d need a lot more than the diner had on hand to dry the rest of me.

“So,” she said, “how are you?”

“Like I said on the phone: I got a headache, Lieutenant. In more ways than one.”

She snorted. “Tell me about it.” She sipped her coffee and winced.

“I already have, last night at the station; your stenographer took it down for posterity. The meat, anyway. My ‘client’s’ disappearing act this afternoon was just the gravy.”

Ed brought my coffee. I added two teaspoons of sugar and a large dollop of cream and drank deeply. It was like a transfusion after losing six pints of blood. My taste buds cringed, but the rest of me felt much better. Stanwyck stared; I shrugged. “Sometimes it’s worse not to drink it,” I said. “What’d you find out about Gloria?”

“We checked her pocketbook, Robert. No identification. Nothing but some cash and a miniature dictionary.”

“English?”

“Yeah.”

“Hm!” Gloria may not have been erudition-in-a-skirt, but her spoken English was fine, and I never saw her look up a word in the Webster’s on her desk. Of course, now that I thought about it, I’d never seen her open any book, or any magazine, either, not even one of those we got every week to keep the clients entertained. The things you don’t know about people, even when you’re around them every day. “Her apartment?”

She shook her head. “The address is a rooming house. The owner, old gal named Martha Ivers, never heard of her.”

“Nuts.” I finished the coffee in another long gulp and waved at Ed for a refill.

“You—sure,” he said, with the same astonished smile he’d displayed when Lizabeth Duryea had asked for more. Even he didn’t drink his own coffee.

Stanwyck sipped hers cautiously. “How long’d she work for you?”

“I told you last night: a couple months.”

“You didn’t check her out very carefully.”

“I needed a secretary, Lieutenant. She applied. She typed. She smiled. She made coffee.” Ed filled my cup. “Good coffee.” Ed beamed. I added cream and sugar.

“So does Bacall,” said Stanwyck, “but at least I called his mother before I gave him a job.”

“Bacall’s a kid.”

“And Gloria Mitchum’s a kidder. A dead kidder.”

Ed reappeared, this time holding a beige ceramic plate. “Here y’ go, Mr. Grahame,” he said. He set the sandwich down. The phone behind the counter rang. “’Scuse me,” he said, and went to answer it.

I drank again. The second cup was less necessary, and even with the additives, it made me wince. “He must put bullets in with the grounds,” I said, and added more sugar. “Speaking of bullets: Learn anything from the ones I gave you?”

“Criss Cross,” Ed said into the phone.

Stanwyck shook her head. “Just that they’re from a gun like we’ve never seen before.”

“Oh?” Somehow, that wasn’t a surprise.

“Yeah. Probably something experimental, for the war, that never got mass-produced.”

“Yeah,” said Hopper, “she’s here. One second.”

“The bullets must’ve really flattened out,” she went on. “We can’t figure out how they made that big a hole if they came out of Siegel. It’s—”

Ed covered the mouthpiece and called, “Lieutenant Stanwyck? It’s for you. Officer Bacall.”

“Okay, Ed. Thanks.” She got up and headed for the phone. “If they are the ones, it’s like they shrank, Robert, after they went through whatever they hit. Be right back.” She lifted the receiver. “Yeah, Humphrey.”

I had never seen Stanwyck turn pale, but whatever Bacall said drained all the color out of her. “You’re kidding!” she exploded at him. “And you double-checked? Triple-checked? . . . Well, what does he say?—besides ‘It’s impossible.’ . . . Well, find it!” She sighed, a deep, exasperated growl. “Yeah, okay, okay. I’ll be right there.”

She hung up, walked back to the booth, and stood there, lost in thought.

“Somethin’ wrong?”

“Yeah, something’s wrong! Where were you when you called me?”

“I told you: the Hotel Niagara. Trying to stop my head from spinning.”

“Anyone see you there?”

“Fritz Lorre,” I told her. “I talked to him when I got there. The desk clerk, Jacques something, saw me leave. So did the kid who runs the elevator. Why?”

Stanwyck picked up her purse. “Well,” she said, “this is gonna make your head spin, Robert. Gloria Mitchum? She’s missing.”

“Missing?”

“From the morgue. Bacall says the coroner just called. Looks like somebody sneaked in, knocked out the guy on duty—he’s okay, but he didn’t see a thing—and stole his clothes. And her body.” She took a quarter from her pocketbook and dropped it on the table. “I’ll call you when I get a minute,” she said. “You can tell me the rest then.” She looked at me once more, shook her head and walked out.

I was hungry. I finished my sandwich.

* * *

The rain had begun again by the time I was through, but it was just intermittent drops and I couldn’t get much wetter, anyway. I slung the raincoat over my shoulder and went to the register. I asked Ed, “How much?”

“Egg sandwich and coffee?” I nodded. “Forty cents,” he computed.

I checked my pockets. They yielded a dime, two nickels and some pennies, so I reached for my wallet. It wasn’t in the hip pocket where I usually kept it. Or anywhere else. “I seem to have forgotten my wallet,” I said.

Hopper shrugged. “Oh, that’s okay, Mr. Grahame. I trust you for it.”

“Thanks, Ed. I’ll bring it around tomorrow. Sorry.”

“Sure. No problem. Night.” He sat and picked up his paper again.

“Good night,” I said. I opened the umbrella and walked into the dampness of the approaching dusk.