On the third floor a tired samba beat came through the door that announced the studio of the dance. A sailor stood in the hall talking in low tones to a miss in black velveteen slacks and a cerise blouse. Neither of them looked at me as I went by. She was shaking her head dully. His lips were an inch from her ear.
Acme shared the fourth floor with the skin specialist. On the opaque glass of the upper half of the aged oak door was painted, without caps: acme—industrial supplies—c. armand lefay, president.
There was a mail slot in the door. I knocked. No answer. I looked closely at the knob and saw dust on it. I tried the knob and found the door was locked.
The skin specialist’s door was not locked. A sign said COME IN. I went in. A girl in white behind the desk looked up at me with visible annoyance. She was blonde and sallow and her eyes were set too close together. There was a book propped up in front of her, an historical novel with a mammary cover, and she had been filing her nails as she read.
“Do you have an appointment?” she asked. Her voice was colorless and nasal.
“I don’t want to see the doctor. I was wondering how I could get in touch with your neighbor across the hall, Mr. LeFay. How often does he come in?”
“I couldn’t say.”
“Do you see him often?”
“I don’t pay no attention.”
“Have you ever seen him?”
“A couple times, sure.”
“Could you tell me what he looks like?”
“What goes on? You a cop or a bill collector or what? Or you want to sell him something?”
“None of those. I just want to get in touch with him. I thought you might help me out. I’d appreciate it.”
She smiled reluctantly. “You don’t look like any of those things except maybe a salesman. He’s a mousy little guy. I mean you wouldn’t ever look at him close. He could be five-foot-four or five-foot-seven, and thirty-five or fifty-five. Just one of those people you don’t look at.”
“Does he have a secretary?”
“If he has, I’ve never seen her or heard her. I’m too busy to keep my nose in what goes on across the hall. Honest, I’m sorry I can’t help you, but honest to God, I couldn’t even tell you what it says on the door—and I couldn’t care less.”
I smiled, “I was going to ask you where he lives, but I guess that’s no good.”
She smiled, and again it looked as if it hurt her mouth. “I could maybe help a little bit. I got a hunch he lived right in that office for a while. It’s against the rules, but who’s going to check? I figured that because I’d smell something cooking when I’d come in in the morning. But I haven’t smelled anything lately.”
“Have you ever seen an army officer in uniform on the stairs? Man in his fifties? Florid complexion?”
“I don’t have time to keep going up and down the stairs and anyway, I keep my door shut all the time. That junky music from downstairs drives me nuts. The same records, over and over and over, and if all that’s down there is a dance studio, I’ll eat every record they got in the place. We’ve been here nine years and it gets worse and worse. The doctor talks about moving, but will he ever do anything? Not him. We’ll be right here the day the goddamn place falls down.”
I backed to the door. “Thanks a lot.”
“For what?”
I went down the stairs. The sailor was gone. The girl in black slacks and cerise shirt was still there, cupping her elbow in her palm, shoulders against the wall, staring at the floor, smoking. She gave me an opaque look as I went by her, tramped on her cigarette, and went into the dance studio. Another record started to play.
I walked three blocks to my car. The rain had stopped. I tossed the raincoat onto the back seat. I put the car in a lot near the hotel and went to my room and called Mottling from there. I got him on the line and told him in as casual a voice as I could manage that I had decided to back Granby.
“I’m sorry, of course,” he said smoothly, “but thanks for letting me know.”
“That was the arrangement. Glad to do it.”
“I guess you know I hate like the devil to give up this job. Thanks again for letting me know, fella. ’By now.”
I hung up and frowned at the wall. The reaction had been too perfect, too casual. There was no doubt that he had known. Dolson had known, Lester had known, and Mottling had known. The phone rang, startling me. I picked it up.
“Gevan? Stanley Mottling again. Wondered if I have your permission to tell Mrs. Dean? She’s anxious to know.”
“I thought I’d go out there and tell her myself later on today.”
“I think that’s a good idea. See you at the meeting on Monday.”
The moment I hung up, the phone rang again and the switchboard girl downstairs said, “I’m holding a call for you, Mr. Dean. Go ahead, miss.”
“Gevan?” I recognized Perry’s voice. She was upset.
“Yes, Perry.”
“I’m across the street from the offices. This is the second time I tried to get you this morning, Gevan. I’m scared. Somebody got into my files last night, or before I got in this morning. The Acme folders are gone. I could still get totals from the books but they won’t mean as much because they don’t show the items.”
“Was the file locked?”
“Yes. It’s a combination safe file. But when Captain Corning came here, he got authority to change all the combinations on the safe files. He’d have a list in his office, of course. Colonel Dolson could have gotten hold of that list, wouldn’t you think?”
After a few moments she asked in a small voice, “Are you still there, Gevan?”
“Sorry, I was thinking. There should be duplicates in the Army office files. Do you think Alma Brady could grab those, if they haven’t already disappeared?”
“I thought of that when I couldn’t get you on the phone. I made an excuse to go over there. She didn’t come in this morning.”
“Maybe she was too upset after last night. Do you have her address? I could go see her. You said a rooming house, didn’t you?”
“Go by my house headed east and take the next right. It’s in the middle of the block. A green and white house on the left. I think the number is 881. I’ve got to get back, Gevan. I haven’t told Mr. Granby about files being missing. Should I? He’ll be wild.”
“Keep it to yourself for a while. If there isn’t a big furor, somebody is going to start wondering why. It may make them nervous.”
It was just eleven o’clock when I parked in front of the only green and white house in the middle of the block. She had missed the number, but not by much. I went up onto the porch. The wind rocked a green wicker rocking chair. I pushed the bell and above the wind’s sound I could hear it ring in the back of the house. I felt uneasy. Through the glass of the door, between lace curtains; I saw a vast woman waddling down the hallway toward the door, emerging from the gloom like something prehistoric.
She opened the door. She couldn’t have been more than twenty pounds too light for a fat-lady job in any circus. Her eyes were pretty, and the rest of the huge face sagged in larded folds. She was a prisoner inside that flesh. Somewhere inside the half-barrel haunches, the ponderous, doughy breasts and belly, stood a woman who was not old and who had once been pretty. Her tiny pink mouth crouched warily back in the crevice between the slablike cheeks.
Her voice was thin and musical. “Good morning.”
“I wonder if I could see Miss Alma Brady.”
“You can find her over to Dean Products. She works civil service over there, for Colonel Dolson.”
“She didn’t report for work this morning.”
“That’s funny! If somebody’s sick, the other girls, they tell me. I can’t get upstairs and the girls, they all take care of their own rooms, so I wouldn’t see her if she was sick in bed. Come to think of it, I didn’t see her go out this morning.” She moved to the foot of the stairs. The hall floor creaked under her weight.
“Alma! Alma, honey!” Her v
oice was thin, clear, and young. She was a yard across the hips.
We listened and she called again and there was no answer. I said, “She might be asleep. If you could tell me which room I could go and check.”
“Well—I don’t like to break the rules and that’s one of the rules, about no men on the second floor.”
I had to try my Arland magic again. “My name is Dean. Gevan Dean. Dean Products. I can show you identification.”
“I was wondering where I’d seen you and now I know it was in the papers, so I guess it’s all right if you go on up, Mr. Dean. Golly, I didn’t know Alma knew you. You go right on up and straight down the hall toward the back of the house to the last door on the left. You know, funny thing, that girl’s been on my mind lately. She used to be so sunny, and lately she’s been awful sour.”
I went up two stairs at a time. The hall had a girl smell—perfume and lotions and astringents and wave set. And the echoes of night gigglings, and whispered confidences and man hunger and pillows salted with tears.
I knocked at Alma’s door. There was no answer. I opened the door cautiously and saw that the room was empty. I went in. The bed had not been slept in. It looked as if our Alma had had a night on the tiles. I couldn’t blame her. Not in her frame of mind. I remembered she had been carrying a red coat in my hotel room. I looked in her closet. No red coat. So the odds were she hadn’t come back to her room last night. There was a picture on her maple dressing table. A tinted photograph of a young man in swim trunks. He looked stiffly into the camera, unsmiling, his arms held awkwardly so the muscles would bulge.
I went downstairs and gave the fat woman a reassuring smile. “I guess she just didn’t come in at all last night.”
“Oh, she came in, all right.”
“You saw her?”
“No, but my room is off the kitchen, right under hers, and I heard her moving around, quiet like. It woke me up. I sleep light, and my clock has hands you can see in the dark. It was after three.”
“I guess she came in and went out again, because the bed isn’t slept in.”
“You know, I remember thinking in the night it was good for her to be going out with a gentleman friend again. She used to keep real late hours, and come dragging in at dawn and sleep a little and go off to work bright as a dollar. I guess you can do that when you’re young as she is. She was cheerful then, like I said, but since she’s been spending the evenings in her room, she’s been broody. No pleasant word for anybody, and she was one of my nicest girls. They don’t go much for the late dates except on week ends, because some of them are studying a lot on their graduate work over to the college.”
“Would it be too much trouble to check with your other girls and see if any of them saw her last night or this morning, Mrs.—”
“Colsinger. Martha Colsinger, Mr. Dean. Where should I phone you if I find out anything, or will you come back?”
“You can phone me at the Gardland. If I’m not in, please leave your name and I’ll phone you back. I hope it isn’t too much trouble.”
“No, because I’d check anyway. I got a kind of uneasy feeling about all this. You don’t think anything could have happened to her, do you?”
“I don’t think so. I certainly hope not.”
I thanked her and left. I told myself I was primarily interested in seeing Niki because I wanted to see what her reaction would be to my decision to back Walter Granby. Of course, it wasn’t a final decision. It was a bluff. I had until the Monday meeting to make my actual decision.
But as I drove, a little too fast, toward the Lime Ridge house, I had enough fragmented decency to be conditionally honest with myself. I wanted to look at her. I wanted to see her because our sunlit orgy had become unreal and implausible. It was an episode I knew I should try to forget, yet, perversely, I wanted some confirmation from her that it had actually happened.
A time of sleep, even when it is as dream-torn as mine had been, erects a curious barrier. The memory of that particular kind of frenzy becomes very like the memory of having been very drunk. It is difficult to credit yourself with the remembered things done and said. You say, “That could not have been me! I am not like that! There is some mistake. There is some significant thing I have forgotten which makes all the rest of it excusable.”
Low, misty clouds were moving quickly, sometimes touching the tops of the rolling hills. The air was humid with spring, and warming rapidly.
Victoria greeted me, smiling, and told me to wait in the living-room. I watched her narrowly, alert for any subtle hint that she had learned, somehow, what had happened. Maids can make an entire construction from the smallest carelessness. I wondered if Niki had been properly careful with my stained clothing and with the toilet kit she had provided. Though usually I give less than a damn about what anybody thinks of how I live and what I do, I surprised myself with the extent of my concern for Victoria’s good opinion. She struck me as being, in that only basic and pertinent way, a lady. And she would assess sudden and sweaty copulation between the new widow and the brother of the deceased as a unique vileness. Which it was.
There was no change in her remote, friendly politeness. As she walked away I suddenly knew that if Victoria guessed what had happened after she left, she would no longer be here. She was that sort of a person. So Niki, no matter what other motivations she might have, would be extraordinarily careful for fear of losing an exceptionally good servant.
I waited tensely in the rich silence of the big room. It was a handsome but sterile room. I saw it was a room without sign or stain that life had gone on in it. (This model home is in the hundred-and-fifty-thousand price range. Note the subtle yet effective use of color. The small placards show where each item may be purchased. Please do not touch anything.)
Niki came walking in quickly, brisk and smiling, coming to me to put the quick light kiss at the corner of my mouth, then say with a housewife’s glib affection, “Hello, my darling. I’ve missed you.”
She wore a man’s white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and closely tailored pale blue denim ranch pants. Her hair was latched back with a twist of matching blue yarn. A scab of mud was drying on the right knee of the ranch pants. She carried work gloves and a muddy grubbing tool, shaped like a green steel claw. (And this model represents the lovely mistress of the $150,000 house who loves to work in her garden on warm spring mornings.)
“If you need props, you could wheel a wheelbarrow in.”
She looked at the gloves and garden tool. “I didn’t know I’d brought these in. I can be nervous too, you know. Give me that much credit, Gevan.”
She walked over to place the tool and gloves on the raised hearth. As she did so, the pale crust of mud fell from her knee and broke on the rug. She squatted and carefully picked up every crumb, her back to me. The coarse denim was pulled as tight as her skin. There were no kidney pads of fat, no rope of softness above the stricture of the dark blue belt. There was a long and firm blending of line, from the reversed parentheses outlining the trimness of the waist, down into the reverse curve of the inverted, truncated, Valentine heart of solid buttocks. Even as she sat so effortlessly on her heels, she kept her back so straight, the small of her back was concave. Her figure was strangely deceptive. She was so basically sturdy as to be, in thigh, hip and breast, almost massive. Yet the total impression she gave was of actual slenderness. This was the product of her height, of the long oval of her face—designed for a more fragile woman—of the quick, light way she moved, of her short-waisted, leggy build, and of her lack of any sagging softnesses, any self-indulgent bulgings. She was styled for function, designed with the merciless economy men expend on the weapons with which they kill. There are never many of them in the world at any one time, and fewer who, like Niki, had peaked into such rich and awesome splendor.
Looking at her confirmed every memory of the previous day, and made me willing to partially—very partially—forgive myself. Hers was an earthiness and a primitive readiness that created a re
sponse so atavistic, all the intellectualizings and moralizings of a modern man were flung aside, like dust from a spinning disk.
She dropped the crumbs of mud into an ash tray, walked over and sat on the flat wooden arm of a handsome chair and seemed to study me with care. “I really thought you would come back last night. I thought of cute little ways of keeping you from feeling too awkward about coming back so soon.”
“Would they have worked?”
“Probably not. But five minutes after you were here, it wouldn’t have mattered, would it?”
“I almost came back.”
“You were a stuffy fool not to.” She carefully examined a fingernail. “You should know this isn’t a good time, dear. If you want, I’ll send her off on some errands, but I think it would be too obvious, don’t you?”
“I didn’t come here for …”
“Not so loud, darling!” She stood up. “I’ll go change. Victoria will bring some ice. You make us some drinks and we’ll have lunch.”
“I can’t stay that long, thanks.”
With a waspish look, she said, “You make it pretty damn difficult for me to remember I’m spending the rest of my life with you.”
“It’s all decided?”
“Isn’t it?”
“Yesterday you seemed to be setting up some conditions.”
“Oh, that! Just get over all the hostility, sweet. But don’t take too long, please. I want to be your girl, without all this … disputation.”
I went over and sat on a low windowseat and looked at her across thirty feet of the room’s silence. “We’re trying to move too fast,” I told her.
“I know it. I didn’t mean it to be this way. I was going to be the muted widow, darling, with a carefully calculated sigh and snuffle from time to time, and I was going to be terribly proper about the whole routine. But that very first time I saw you, just before Stanley arrived, remember? My splendid intentions went all to hell. It was … like a spell. I guess I knew then I couldn’t continue the act, but I told myself it was just one little slip that didn’t count. Yesterday, darling, maybe you won’t believe this, but I plotted that little sun-lotion routine just to prove to myself I was a girl of character. I was going to tease you, darling, that’s all. I wanted you to want me and be able to do nothing about it. I thought you’d cap the bottle and scramble back to the wall and try to look as if it didn’t matter, and I was going to be laughing at you, inside. But … all of a sudden there was no turning back for either of us. Yes, we’re going too fast. I know that. I didn’t plan it that way. But we are, and I don’t think there’s very much we can do about it.”
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