“I would like to speak to Mr. Calvin Stebber.”
“What number were you calling, sir?”
“Six one three-one eight seven eight.”
“I am sorry. There is no Calvin Stebber here, sir.”
“Miss, I suppose that it’s one of the oldest code situations in the world. You always ask for the number to be repeated, and the party calling is supposed to change one digit. But I don’t happen to have the code.”
“I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking ubout, sir.”
“No doubt. I am going to call you back at exactly quarter to one, twelve minutes from now and in the meantime you tell Mr. Stebber that somebody is going to call who knows something about Wilma Werner, Wilma Wilkinson, take your choice.”
She hesitated a half breath too long before saying, “I am terribly sorry that all this means absolutely nothing to me, sir. You’ve made a mistake, really.”
She was very good. So good the hesitation seemed to lose significance.
I tried it again at the promised time. “Yes?”
“Is Mr. Stebber interested in Wilma? This is me again.”
“Actually, you know, I shouldn’t be so childish its to let this nonsense fascinate me, whoever you are. I suppose it’s because I am having a dull and boring day. Do you think that could be it?”
“Nonsense fascinates lots of people.”
“You do have rather a nice voice. You know, if you aren’t too busy for nonsense, you could break up my afternoon with more of it. Why don’t you mystify me again, say, at three fifteen?”
“It will be my pleasure. I’ll be the one with the red rose in his teeth.”
“And I shall be wearing a girlish smirk. Goodbye, sir.”
I stepped out of the booth. “What are you grinning at?” Chook demanded.
“The good ones are always a pleasure. She couldn’t contact Stebber so quickly. But without giving away one damn thing, she lined me up to call back at three fifteen. Then if Stebber is interested, they open a door. If not, she gives me the girlish chitchat, and I hang up never really knowing for sure. Very nice.”
She pulled herself taller. “It means you’re outclassed, doesn’t it, sweetie? Stebber has this terribly keen girl, and you’re making do with a big dull dancer.”
“Oh for God’s sake, why should a little impersonal admiration raise your hackles?”
“Feed me,” she said. “All women are at war all the time, and when I’ve got hunger pains, it shows a little more.”
We went to the upper level where she ate like a timber wolf, but with more evidences of pleasure than any wolf would exhibit. There was so much of her, and it was so aesthetically assembled, so vivid, so a-churn with vitality that she faded the people for ten tables around to frail flickering monochromatic images, like a late late movie from a fringe station. She provided me, in certain measure, with a cloak of invisibility.--Okay, fella, but describe the guy she was with…--Just a guy. Big, I think. I mean, hell, I don’t think I really looked at him, Lieutenant.
She sipped coffee and smiled, sighed, smiled again.
“You look like a happy woman, Miss McCall.” I reached across the table and touched her with a fingetrip right between and a little above those black black brows. “There were two lines here.”
“Gone now? Son of a gun. Gee, Trav, I don’t know. I talk. I talk my fool head off. There in the dark with him holding me, mostly. Things I’ve never told anyone. He listens and he remembers. I skip around, back and forth through my dumb life. I guess I’m trying to understand. I’m talking to myself at the same time, about Frankie, about how my mother made me ashamed of growing too big to fit into her dream, about running off and getting married at fifteen and annulled at sixteen, knocking around, and then buckling down and really working hard and making it and saving money so I could go back in style and knock their eye out. I knew just how it would be, Trav. I would wear that mink cape into that house and my mother and my grandmother would stare, and then I would let them know I hadn’t gotten it the way they were thinking, and show them the scrapbook. Nineteen years old. God!
“There were strangers in the house, Trav. An impatient woman, and kids running all over the place. My grandmother had been dead over a year, and my mother was in the county home. Premature senility. She thought I was her sister, and she begged me to get her out of there. I got her into another place. A bill and a half a week for a year and a half, Trav, and then she had one big stroke instead of continuous little ones, and she died without ever knowing. Arthur asked me how I really know that. Maybe she had some lucid spell when she knew and was proud.” Her eyes swam and she shook her head. “Okay. He’s good for me. Like my head was full of little knots. I talk and talk and talk, and he says something, and a little knot loosens.” She scowled. “The thing about Frankie, when he finds out something bugs you, a long time later he’ll say something that’ll make it bug you more. I explained that to Arthur. He says maybe that’s why I need Frankie, so he can punish me and I don’t have to punish myself.
“Trav, you really have to give Arthur something to do. I can only hoist him up so far. You treat him like a tanglefoot kid, and when I make him into a man it doesn’t hold. It doesn’t last. Maybe, Trav, that’s a more important part than the money. He talks about those jobs at Everglades. Wistful, sort of. When he ran the store it was all kind of set. The buyers knew what to buy for that city. And he had good display and advertising people, and the merchandising was kind of all established before he got into it. But he said if you can put up rough studding and it stands true and the foreman comes around and says okay, then you think people are going to live there for years, and winds won’t blow it down. I can’t say it like he does. But you see, except for the store which was all set anyway, everything he ever did got botched up. Everything except those crummy little jobs. If you trust him to do something, he’ll trust himself more.”
So I promised I would, and I told her we had time, before three fifteen, to get a little better set. I bought a newstand map of Tampa and I rented n pale gray Galaxie. They are turning Tampa into the customary nothing. It used to be memorable as one of the grubbiest and most infuriating traffic mazes south of the Chelsea area of Boston. Now they are ramming the monster highways through it, and one day soon it will become merely a momentary dinginess. They’ve opened up the center of the city into a more spacious characterlessness, and, more and more, they are converting Ybor City into fake New Orleans. In home remote year the historians will record that Twentieth Century America attempted the astonishing blunder of changing its culture to fit automobiles instead of people, putting a skin of concrete and asphalt over millions of acres of arable land, rotting the hearts of their cities, so encouraging the proliferation of murderous, high-speed junk that when finally the invention of the Transporlon rendered the auto obsolete, it took twenty years and half a trillion dollars to obliterate the ugliness of all the years of madness, and rebuild the supercities in a manner to dignify the human instead of his toys.
I left Chook in the car and went into the reference section of the library and looked up the Buccaneer in Lloyd’s Register of Yachts. There were a slew of them, and I found the one registered out of Tampa that was a hundred and eighteen feet long, a converted Coast Guard cutter, owned by Foam-Flex Industries. I phoned them and was shunted up through the pyramid to the Vice President in Charge of Sales and Promotion, a Mr. Fowler with a little trace of Vermont in his speech.
“On anything like that,” he said, “you’d have to check with Mr. Robinelli at the Gibson Yards where we keep her. The way it works, we set up an advance schedule for executive use of the vessel, and empower Mr. Robinelli to charter her when such charters will not interfere with company plans in any way. These charters, and I wish there were more of them, help with maintenance, dockage, insurance and payroll of the permanent crew. I don’t have a copy of the advance schedule handy, but I could have someone get it. I happen to know she is at the Yard right now. If you…”