The night clerk looked up from his bookkeeping as I came in. I didn’t look back at him, but I could feel his eyes following me all the way to the telephone desk.
I smiled at the girl at the switchboard. “Mr. Gell,” I said. “Please tell him that Mr. Premmer sent me. He’s expecting me.”
“Mr. Gell’s not in,” she said.
I tried to put incredulity and disappointment on my map, and let her see the combination. “But he’s expecting me.”
“He’s out.”
“When will he be back?”
“I’m not certain he’ll be back.”
“Look here,” I said, leaning over the wooden partition. “It’s all right. You tell him Mr. Premmer sent me.”
“But he’s out,” she said. And then, as she looked in my eyes, I saw her own soften. “Honest,” she said, “he went out about ten minutes ago.”
“Then he’ll be back,” I said confidently, “because he’s expecting me.”
She said, “He told me that if there were any messages, to say that he wouldn’t be back again tonight.”
I clung doggedly to the rail. “He’ll be back. He’s expecting me. Premmer sent me.”
The night clerk looked over at the switchboard.
“Miss Marr,” he called.
The girl looked up at him. He jerked his head. She took off her headset, swung out of the chair, and walked across to him. He waited until she was close enough so his words would be inaudible to me. They talked together in low tones for a few seconds. She gave an unconscious gesture with her head in my direction so I knew they were talking about me. But the night clerk didn’t look at me—not after that first look.
After a while, the night clerk went back to his books, and Miss Marr returned to the switchboard.
“I simply have to see him,” I said. “Do you know where I could reach him with a telephone call or something?”
“No,” she said, “I don’t. I don’t know where he went.”
Her voice sounded thin and forlorn.
I lit a cigarette, puffed at it twice, then jerked it out of my mouth, and dropped it into the brass cuspidor.
“You can wait if you want to,” she said, “but I’m quite certain he won’t be back. He specifically told me so.”
“He didn’t say anything about me? Mr. Lam?”
“No.”
I heaved a sigh. “Well,” I said, “I know he’ll be back. He’ll get in touch with Mr. Premmer, and Premmer will tell him that I was on my way out. I was delayed, but Premmer told me to see him tonight.”
“I don’t think he’ll be back,” she said.
I paced the floor for a while, went over and sat down in a chair, then, when the night clerk started looking at me again, got up and walked over to the girl at the telephone desk. “Listen,” I said in a low voice, “if he should call up, you be sure to tell him that Mr. Lam is waiting, won’t you?”
“Okay, I will.”
I hung around. “Nasty night out, isn’t it?”
“Is it? It was clear when I came to work.”
“I know, but clouds drifted in, and it started to rain. Maybe it’s just a drizzle. What time did you come to work?”
“Four o’clock this afternoon.”
An eight hour shift would make her time off at midnight.
I looked at my wristwatch, and said, so the night clerk would hear me, “Well, I’ll wait until midnight. If he doesn’t telephone by then, I’ll have to call it off I guess. You’re sure you don’t know where I could reach him?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea.”
I stood there at the desk ostentatiously looking at my wristwatch. It was six minutes to twelve.
When the electric clock on the wall said two minutes of twelve, the girl at the desk started powdering her nose. She opened the drawer in the desk, took out the movie magazine, rolled it up, and snapped an elastic band around it.
“Well,” I said dolefully, “I’ve got sixty seconds more, and then I guess I’m licked.”
Her eyes showed sympathy.
At midnight, she clicked a few keys on the switchboard, slipped off the headset, went to the closet, and put on a baggy, cloth coat with imitation fox fur around the collar.
“You quitting?” I asked.
“Yes.”
I said, “Well, I am too,” and walked out toward the door. She was a dozen steps behind me. I heard her say goodnight to the night clerk, and his cold, toneless, “Good morning, Miss Marr.”
It was raining hard outside. It was a cold rain. The drops were big and came down hard, making little bursts of water where they hit the dark pavement. I heard her give a little exclamation behind me as she saw the weather.
Yucca City turned out most of the lights at midnight. The clouds had settled low enough so the lights from the metropolitan district below were all blotted out. The Mountain Crest Apartments seemed to be shut off from the rest of the world, an island of wan light isolated in a sea of darkness.
I looked back over my shoulder, and said, casually and taking care to keep eagerness from my voice, “Pretty wet. I have a car across the street. I’ll give you a lift,” and then added hastily, “that is, if you’re going toward town.”
She looked me over, and said, “I am. I didn’t bring my galoshes. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky when I came to work, and the paper said it was going to be clear today and tomorrow with seasonal temperatures.”
“I know,” I told her, and yawned to show that taking girls home after midnight came under the head of a chivalrous chore. “Wait here out of the rain, and I’ll go get the crate—that is, if it’ll start.”
I sprinted through the rain, and prayed that Bertha Cool’s idea of dependable transportation would do its stuff. It did.
I switched on the lights, started the windshield wiper, gunned the motor a couple of times, and skidded around in a U-turn.
I didn’t get out when I drove up to the curb, but reached across and carelessly flung the door open. She ran across and jumped in beside me.
“Gosh, it’s a cold rain,” she said.
“Ain’t it,” I told her, and eased in the clutch. “Where do you go?”
The car lurched forward.
“Straight into Yucca City,” she said. “It’s about six blocks. You can let me off at the main intersection, and I’ll walk up the hill.”
“Okay,” I said. As I slipped the car into second, I added, “I sure hated to miss Gell. It means a lot to me.”
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“This is a lonely place up here. Think you’d be afraid walking along this street after midnight.”
“I am,” she admitted. “It’s pretty spooky, and the sidewalks haven’t been cut through all the way. I don’t mind it so much except in rainy weather. On clear nights it’s beautiful. You can look out and see the lights of the city down below and the stars right above you. It looks,” she went on wistfully, “as though you could take a good long jump and leave the whole world behind.”
“You’re too young to feel like that,” I told her.
“You don’t seem very chipper yourself—and you’re young, too,” she said.
I let that pass for a second. “What are those lights down the road?”
“The Yucca Club. They’re trying to make a swanky nightclub out of it.”
“Isn’t this a funny place for a nightclub?”
“Not on clear nights,” she said. “They have a swell place to dance.”
“Dance,” I said.
Her voice was wistful. “Uh huh. The floor is built out over the sidehill, on an enclosed porch. You dance out from the tables onto this porch and look down over the city lights. They keep it almost dark out there, just a starlight effect.”
“It won’t be starlight tonight,” I said, “but a good shot of Scotch might help. How about it? Do you feel the same way about a slug of Scotch I do?”
She hesitated a minute, and said, “I don’t know.”
The main intersection loomed up, and I shot on past it.
“That was my street,” she said.
I put on the brakes, and the agency bus skidded for a few feet, straightened, and skidded again. I felt her hand grab at my shoulder.
“It’s okay,” I said. “Tire a little smooth, that’s all.”
“Don’t stop so quickly,” she said.
“I won’t,” I told her, coasting along into the curb. “Can you make a U-turn in the middle of the block here, or do they put strangers in jail?”
“Better go to the next intersection,” she said.
I looked along toward the lights of the Yucca Club. “We could,” I suggested, “go in there and get just one slug of Scotch.”
I felt her leaning toward me, her voice almost low-pitched in its eagerness. “Listen,” she said, “did you want to see Mr. Gell very badly?”
“Did I!” I echoed.
“Listen, he may be there in the club. He likes to hang out there.”
“That’s swell. But I won’t know him when I see him.”
“I could point him out to you.”
“Think he’d want to talk business at night?”
“I don’t know,” she said, fighting to keep her voice casual. “But we could find out if he’s there.”
“Yes,” I said. “We could look in. The kind of business I have with him, I wouldn’t want to discuss if he— Well, you know, if he was on a party.”
“Well, we could see.”
“Think he’d be alone?”
“Perhaps.”
The windshield wiper was out of adjustment. It didn’t scrape much rain off the windshield, but distributed the water in a half circle of distorted visibility. There were a couple of leaks where the windshield joined the body, and I could feel water dripping in on my right ankle. I said, “Look here, I don’t mind spending dough when I get some action for it. But I don’t like to blow what little money I have pretending I’m a millionaire when I’m not. Do they stick you in this joint?”
“Plenty,” she said, “but— Oh, let’s go in. I have a little money if you’re short.”
I looked at her and asked, “You want to go in that particular place for some particular reason?”
“Yes,” she said, shortly.
“Okay,” I said. “What’s your first name?”
“Ruth.”
“Mine’s Donald,” I said. “Donald Lam.”
She said, “They don’t have a cover charge, but there’s a minimum. I think it’s two dollars. If I pay for it, would you—would you go in and sit at a table with me and eat a dinner? They have a dollar and a half dinner that’s very good, and we could sort of kill time and— You dance, don’t you?”
“Uh huh.”
“Well, we could dance and wait around until the place closes at two o’clock. You see, Donald, I can’t very well go in without an escort and—and I want—I want to be having a good time if anyone should see me.”
“You think we’ll find Gell there?” I asked.
“Maybe.”
“Okay, Ruth, let’s go.”
I turned into the circular driveway in front of the place. The attendant came forward with an umbrella. He looked down his nose at the car, but helped Ruth Marr out. I got out, and he gave me a celluloid check with a number on it. As a doorman swung open the main door for us, I saw the parking attendant looking at Bertha’s car as though he hesitated about getting in and trying to drive the heap. Ruth Marr said, in a quick burst of conversation, “Let’s go into the cocktail bar first, have a cocktail, and then go in and get a table. —Listen, Donald, please don’t look as though we’re—you’re looking for anyone. Just pretend that you’re with me, and that we’re making a little whoopee, and—well, you know, that you’re glad to be with me.”
“Sure,” I said.
She put her head up and sailed into the joint as though she was Mrs. Astor’s pet horse. She tilted her chin a little bit, and gave me a seductive, sidelong glance and a low, throaty laugh as we stopped before the checking desk.
For a moment, the resemblance was startling. She’d been watching that blonde of Cunner’s, and she must have been practicing the trick in front of a mirror.
The girl at the checking stand took my wet hat and Ruth’s limp cloth coat while she sized us up with calculating eyes that failed to register any smile of greeting.
I took Ruth’s arm, and led her into the hilarious gayety of the cocktail bar.
We sat at one end so we could look down along the bar. I tried to classify the different types. There were young men trying to look important; important men trying to look young. There were women of the brittle type who lavished passionate glances on their escorts and then, when the man raised his glass, hurriedly glanced around to see if some more likely looking sucker might be giving them the once over. There were women in pairs who were getting a little too loud; women who continually pawed over their men, men who kept making little gestures which brought their hands in contact with the bare backs of the women with them. Here and there, a couple who were evidently married to each other and were trying to recapture some of the lost spirit of courtship were getting more and more bored with each drink—and each other. Three bartenders were lazily engaged in mixing and serving drinks. They were studies in white-coated impassivity.
Gell and the blonde weren’t there.
Ruth became anxious to get the drinks over with, and get into the main dining room.
I’d sold her on the idea of Scotch, but we changed to Bacardis when the bartender came to take our orders. We wrapped ourselves around the drinks, and Ruth was sliding off the stool almost before I had the last of my cocktail out of my glass.
We went to the door of the main dining room. As we entered, she tucked her hand under my arm, and looked up into my face with a blonde expression. Seductive laughter oozed from her lips. Two seconds later she’d turned from me to stare in an anxiety of hard-eyed dread around the dining room.
The headwaiter sized us up, and piloted us to an obscure table over in one corner. There was no one behind us. From our corner table, we could look out over the entire dining room.
I didn’t need to ask her if Gell was there. Her roving eyes checked the tables behind me, and I could see an expression of relief flood her face as she completed the survey.
“You don’t see anything of Gell, do you?” I asked, casually.
“No,” she said. “He doesn’t seem to be here—yet.”
I was seated facing the long plate-glass windows which, on clear nights, commanded a view of the city below, but now were a dead black with rivulets of cold water trickling in aimless zigzags down the outer surface.
A waiter took our orders. Two dinners with no drinks.
“Let’s dance,” she said.
We went out on the floor. She was light on her feet. With my arm around her waist I could feel the ripple of smooth muscles beneath her clothes. Her firm breasts came close to me as we picked up the beat of the music and pushed into the crowd.
People mashed us, jostled us, trampled us. A middle-aged man, looking mighty proud of himself, danced by with a woman half his age, who rubbed and wiggled. A couple who were no longer young were trying all of the fancy steps, mostly on the toes of the other dancers. We were pushed over to a corner, where a party of sixteen sitting sedately at a table nearby evidently represented a meeting of some business organization. The men all seemed to know each other pretty well, while the women were more stiff and constrained, ranging from the frigid respectability of the executives’ wives down to the good-looking bride of the young salesman who was so painfully anxious to make a good impression on everyone. Then the human whirlpool sucked us into its center once more.
We danced, and more people jostled against us, sending us in turn jostling against others. The couple who were hilariously doing the fancy steps bore down on us like a state highway truck on a construction job hogging the middle of the road. I piloted Ruth out of their way.
After a while, the music quit.
“You’re some dancer, Ruth,” I said.
She gave a nervous little laugh and squeezed my arm. “You, Donald, dance divinely—but you don’t seem to get much pleasure out of it.”
I looked in her eyes. “I’m just a little bit worried,” I said. “It’ll wear off after that drink begins to take effect and we have another dance.”
We went back to the table. She put her purse on the corner within a few inches of my elbow. I knew that in that purse was the note Cunner had written to her. I knew that a man who measured up to Bertha Cool’s standards of a good operative would be able to get that note out long enough to read it.
My job became distasteful to me. I wanted to get up and leave.
Looking out at the rain-lashed darkness, I felt Ruth’s eyes on my face. I shifted my eyes quickly and caught hers. She met my stare steadily and frankly. “Donald,” she asked, “why are you so cynical? You’re too young to be like that.”
“Cynical?” I asked. “I didn’t know that I was.”
“You are.”
“What makes you think so?”
“The way you look. There’s something bitter and disillusioned about you and about the way you look at people.”
“I’ve lived long enough,” I told her, “to know that people have to be taken with a pinch of salt.”
She laughed. “You’re salting them down in brine. Why be like that, Donald?”
“I don’t know,” I told her. “Let’s dance, and this time keep your mind on me.”
“Wasn’t I before?”
“No.”
“Well, after all,” she said, “some of the responsibility rests on the man.”
I took her up at that, and that next dance she didn’t have a chance to think of anyone else. At first, she didn’t like it, and then she did. After the music stopped and we’d started back to the table, she slipped her hand through the curve of my elbow, and said softly, “Really, I’m letting you do things that I wouldn’t permit from anyone else unless I’d known him a long, long time—Donald, there’s something fascinating about you.”
“What?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “You’re detached and cool and self-reliant—you’re like a piece of steel that will bend easy but springs back into shape and is capable of taking a keen cutting edge.”
“You,” I told her, “must have been studying metals.”
She laughed and said, “Not much, just a magazine article about the temper of things. Steel that’s tempered too hard is worse than steel that’s not tempered at all. Donald, do something for me, will you?”
“What?”
“How well do you know Gell?”
“I’ve never met him.”
“I know, but you know a lot about him. You know what he’s doing—and what you wanted to see him about?”
“Well?” I asked.
“Tell me,” she said, leaning forward, “is that his sister, that blonde who’s with him?”
“What blonde?”
“She’s supposed to be his sister.”
“What’s her name?”
“Anita.”
“What’s the matter? Doesn’t she act like his sister?”
Ruth Marr toyed with her water glass, the tips of her fingers twisting the glass around and around. Her eyes refused to meet mine. “No,” she said, “she doesn’t.”
“Want me to find out for you?”
“Would you, Donald?”
“I might try, but it would be dangerous if Gell thought I was snooping.”
“I know, Donald, but you could find out easily.”
“It won’t be so easy. Gell plays ’em close to his chest. He isn’t an easy guy to check up on.”
“Are you,” she asked, “telling me?”
“What’s the matter?” I wanted to know. “He been making passes at you?”
“No, no. He’s just a tenant there in the building, and he’s always nice to me. He has a nice voice over the telephone.”
“Many calls?” I asked casually.
“Not many. They’re always to that sister of his.”
“What do they talk about?” I asked.
“You can’t tell. It’s sort of a code—” She broke off and said, “I just hear a word or two now and then. I wouldn’t listen.”
I kept my eyes on hers. She laughed nervously, and said, “Oh, all right. I listen in—and the more I listen, the less I know.”
“I’ll see what I can find out,” I said.
We had a little food, and then the dance music started again. I looked at her inquiringly, and she nodded. That time, when we danced, I forgot about Bertha Cool, Mrs. Atterby, and Edith Cunner. I thought only of Ruth Marr. I could feel her body against mine. She was dancing close, and so was I. There wasn’t anything vulgar about it, just her warmth mingling with mine and making me tingle all over. I suppose we were both lonesome and had been kicked around just enough so we clicked.
After that dance, I don’t know where the time went. We talked and danced, and during one of the waltzes slid out into a dark corner of the porch, and I felt her trembling lips in a hot circle around my mouth.
I took her home when the place closed. It was raining cats and dogs. She lived in a house up on the hill a couple of blocks above the main drag. The hill was steep enough so one side of the house rested on the ground, and the downhill side was high enough so there was room for a little apartment. Ruth lived in that apartment.
She didn’t go in right away. She said, “I’ll say good night to you in the car, Donald, because the people upstairs sleep right over my door.”
I said good night to her.
She didn’t try to stop me in anything I did. I didn’t try to do too much. I felt that if I did, it might spoil things. She let my hands wander around over the outside of her clothes, caressing her curves. I had a feeling that she’d given me the key to the city, but I didn’t try any doors that I thought she’d prefer to keep locked.
It was almost half an hour later when she breathed, “Donald, darling, I simply have to go. I think you’re awfully nice. Tell me, honey, where can I—when am I going to see you again?”
“I’ll try to give you a ring sometime tomorrow.”
“I don’t know a thing about you, Donald,” she laughed, “where you work, or what you do, or where you live, or—”
I tore a piece of paper from my notebook and scribbled the telephone number of my rooming house. “You can always reach me there,” I said, “although sometimes I’m out for a day or two at a time, and I’m nearly always out evenings.”
She started to ask me what I did, then decided that she’d wait for me to tell her, said, “Good night, Donald,” and we kissed again.
It was still raining, and water had dripped through the cowl of the agency car and soaked my right foot. There was water running down over the rubber mat on the floor, but I was throbbing with warmth. I could feel her heart going pound—pound—pound—pound under the thin silk of her blouse. When I touched her cheeks, they were hot.
“Don’t get out, Donald,” she said. “I don’t want you to. Just let me make a dash for it.”
She opened the car door, slid out to the driveway, and ran up to the door of her little apartment. I sat there watching until she had unlocked the door, gone inside, and switched on the lights. Then I took off the brake, let the car coast downhill, slipped it into gear, and started it by gravity.
The rain was lashing against the windshield, showing as a wall in front of the headlights.