Halfway down the block she stopped, turned and went down a flight of stairs, disappeared. I would have followed her if I could but it was fairly obvious that her apartment was off bounds to me. It didn’t seem fair.
For several minutes I stood on my side of the street watching the building she had entered. Evidently she lived in the basement apartment in that particular brownstone, a building quite indistinguishable from the identical brownstones on either side of it. I stood there, watching, committing the address to careful memory. Then it hit me all at once and I realized where I was.
I was standing right in front of my own building.
I couldn’t believe it at first. I looked around, very cautiously, and sure enough, that was where I was. I was smack dab in front of Mrs. Murdock’s home for wayward newspapermen. The girl of my dreams lived across the street from me, with her bed twenty or forty yards from mine. It seemed impossible.
I told myself that she must have just moved in, that if she had ever been there before I would have known it. Nothing like that could be within a mile of me without my noticing her, sensing her presence.
But who was she? Where had she come from? What was she doing, whoever she was?
I had to know. All the questions — the who what where when why and how that are burned so deeply into a reporter’s brain — they haunted me now. I had to find out about her.
The first step was simple. It required my getting the hell off the streets before the dog catcher saw me standing with my tongue hanging out and carted me off to the pound. It took a little work but I managed it. I dragged myself back to Columbus and aimed myself at Green’s. The notion of a cold glass of beer seemed tremendously appealing all of a sudden. Maybe because I was sweating.
I took a stool and the bartender brought me a glass of beer. He did this without asking. I was a regular at Green’s, although hardly the kind of regular that kept them in meat and potatoes. I was in there once a day, rain or shine, and each and every time I nursed one small glass of draft beer for half an hour or so, paid my fifteen cents and left.
There were plenty of the other sort of regulars. They started early at Green’s and I knew they would be there until the place closed, drinking their lives away slowly, never getting too drunk and never drawing what could be honestly described as a sober breath. Many times I’d thought about them, about the way they spent their lives, and many times I’d figured out that I would have wound up that way if I hadn’t left Louisville.
The bar wouldn’t be Green’s but it would amount to the same thing. One of the rundown joints on East Cedar Street where old reporters go when they don’t get lucky and die of cirrhosis instead.
I sipped my beer. I left the lushes to their alcoholic poison and thought of more intriguing things.
Like the girl.
The hell of it was, she was just what I needed to make my life complete. No sarcasm here — this is the straight dope. Before Little Miss Vision waltzed into my life there was nothing for me — no pleasure, no joy, no imagination, nothing but the monotony of a day-to-day routine that had become increasingly stifling. Now, however, Little Miss Vision had transformed the monotony to fascinating frustration. Now, instead of being bored, I was enhanced, entranced, and ready to be romanced.
Which seemed to be a new version of screwed, glued and tattooed.
Well.
I now had problems — which was, if nothing else, a change from monotony. Problem the first was to find out who in the world the lithe little brunette was. Problem the second was to get to know her. Problem the third, of course, was to get into her pants.
In Louisville the first two problems wouldn’t exist. I would simply say hello to her and she would say hello to me and I would take it from there. But New York was hysterically different. In New York you were considered horrifyingly square if you were on a first-name basis with anyone who lived within a one-mile radius of your residence. In New York you could live across the hall from someone for a lifetime without ever saying hello. And, in New York, if you said hello to a pretty girl on a street you were a masher and subject to arrest, conviction, and permanent residence in the Tombs; an unpleasant prospect at best.
I sipped some more beer and, amazingly, the glass was empty.
This gave me pause. It was a warm day and I had built up a fairly substantial thirst. I certainly could have made good use of a second glass of beer. Hell, I would have loved a second glass of beer. But my life was ordered in such a manner that certain habits had become damnably difficult to break.
I paid fifteen cents for the glass I’d just downed and left Green’s, still thirsty. It was warmer out, which struck me as somewhat silly in view of the fact that it was after six and time for New York to start cooling off for the night. But there was no doubt about it — it was warmer, and the freshness of the day was getting sponged up by a palling mugginess that had sneaked in from Jersey. The breezes had given up for the evening. It was, suddenly and very annoyingly, damned uncomfortable.
I headed back toward my room, then changed my mind and crossed the street to her side of the block. Already in my mind that side had an identity — it was her side as surely as if she had owned every bit of property on it. Before it was just the other side of the block. Now it belonged to her, whoever she might turn out to be.
I stopped in front of her apartment and screwed up my courage for a look at her window. It didn’t reveal anything — bamboo curtains obscured any view I might have otherwise had of my newly beloved. I cursed them, but I had to admit they were nice curtains. What the hell.
What next? All sorts of absurdities suggested themselves to me and one was sillier than the next. I could ring her doorbell and pretend I was a lost seaman from Canarsie. I could tell her I was a census taker and ask her some statistical type questions, like what was her name and how old she was and would she like to have dinner with me. Brilliant notions, all of them.
Think, Lindsay. You’re supposed to be a reporter. You’ve got a hot tip that you have to run down — which of course was ridiculous, because reporters only got hot tips in movies. But this is the way I was carrying on about them.
When the notion came to me it was disgustingly simple, the way most good notions are. I went into the brownstone’s main entrance — not the basement, but the front foyer — and looked at the row of name plates with doorbells attached. At the bottom of a long list of nameless names I found Apartment B, which obviously meant basement. I looked at the name next to it.
I did not believe it.
There was this black strip of plastic, and in white relief it said, for all the world to see, all bold and brazen in its simplicity, CINDERELLA SIMS.
Sure.
So, sharp reporter that I was, I immediately rejected that one and read through all the other names. Maybe Cinderella Sims was the janitress and they had a different listing for the basement apartment. Maybe I was in the wrong building. Maybe I had managed to slip into a different space-time continuum or something.
Maybe anything.
I floated out of the vestibule and down the stairs and across the street. Either my mind wasn’t functioning properly or something, but I felt a little dizzy and a small voice in the back of my head shouted Cinderella Sims until my eardrums threatened to explode. Implode, that is. Explode is when something bursts open from inside, like an overinflated balloon. Implode is when something bursts inward, like a vacuum bulb. It doesn’t make a hell of a lot of difference, but, well, you know.
There was a book in my room that I hadn’t finished yet, a novel by Ben Christopher called A Sound of Distant Drums. It wasn’t the greatest thing since vaudeville but I managed to get lost in it and kill the too many hours before it was time to go to work.