Carole shrugged.
“Well, anybody could mistake a face in this light, so don’t let it spoil our evening.”
“I won’t if you won’t.”
The unshaven shirt-sleeved counterman came and took their order for coffee.
“I still don’t see why he had to be so rude,” Carole said while they waited. “Or why you let him get away with it.”
“Forget it,” Simon answered. “I don’t want to talk about it here.”
They never did recapture the playfulness and gaiety of the earlier part of the evening. Simon parried Carole’s questions about his own life by drawing her out about her own. It had been a sheltered existence. Her mother had died while Carole was still a child. She had been nurtured by nannies, maids, and governesses. Her teens had unfolded trivially in a setting of sail-boats, tennis, house-parties, and debutante balls. Self-mocking, she described herself as a violet blossoming in the shade of a great oak.
The great oak was her father. He had not had her advantages when he was young, and typically he had tried to insulate her from the harsh realities which he had overcome.
“So it was rags to riches,” Simon prompted her, thinking how refreshing it was in these days to meet a rich girl who so positively and genuinely admired and adored the parent whose upward struggle had given her so much.
“Well, not exactly rags,” Carole replied. “Just the ordinary lower-middle-class slog, cutting corners and keeping a beady eye on the budget. Until he struck it rich when I was going to college. I was a spoiled brat, and for a long time I just rebelled against him, but I’ve finally gotten old enough to appreciate what he’s done. I can even admit how proud I am of him. When you have time, I’d like to show you a couple of places he’s responsible for creating.”
She turned her thick coffee-cup in its stained saucer and frowned slightly.
“Of course sometimes he goes too far. You’d think from all his law-and-order talk, and what a hardheaded businessman he is, that he’d be more careful. But he’s a great one for rehabilitating people — like that Richard Hamlin you met tonight. Richard’s an ex-convict. Embezzlement and who knows what else. But Daddy took him under his wing and made him his personal secretary.”
“Hire the handicapped, huh? I thought the casting director had done an off-beat job including Hamlin in that group. Still, he must have a fair set of brains. Embellishing books can be a fine art.”
“Oh, I don’t think he’s dumb,” Carole said. “I just don’t trust him.”
“Why?” he asked with new interest.
But her dislike of Hamlin turned out to be based more on instinctive prejudice and unconscious snobbery (and perhaps a little jealousy of the secretary’s close and confidential relationship with her father) than on facts. It was a prejudice that many a wife has indulged — and usually denied — against the other woman in her husband’s office.
“Helping a lame dog over a stile is supposed to be good boy-scout Christianity,” Simon remarked judiciously. “Although personally I’ve always thought it was one of the silliest precepts ever coined. Did you ever look at a stile? I never saw one yet that a lame dog couldn’t wriggle over much faster than you could lift him over it.”
“Are you being symbolic or just smart?”
“Could be either.”
“I suppose you don’t believe in women’s intuition.”
“I pass.”
She caught Simon glancing at his watch.
“Am I boring you?” she enquired with some acidity.
“No, you’re not, but if you’ve finished your coffee I’d like to get out of here.”
Her reply was to push her empty cup away and pick up her bag from the seat beside her. As he walked with her to the door, Simon noted that the same groups were round the pool tables, and that the seal and the football tackle watched him as he left the bar.
Carole slumped disconsolately as he drove her back towards the New Sylvania.
“We were having such a good time,” she pouted. “What’s wrong? Did I say something? Are you just upset because you thought that man back there was somebody you knew?”
Seeing her stripped of her protective irony, admitting that her relationship with him meant enough to depress her, Simon felt that he owed her an honest answer.
“All right,” he” said. “I’ll tell you. It has nothing to do with you, and I don’t think you could bore me if you recited the telephone directory. I’m still kicking myself because of that imbecilic thing I did back in that bar.”
“What’s imbecilic about mistaken identity?” she demanded. “I’m surprised a man like you would worry about a thing like that. Male vanity?”
“It wasn’t a case of mistaken identity,” said the Saint. “It was a case of the mouth outrunning the brain. That man I spoke to really is named Brad Ryner. At least he was a couple of years ago when I met him out in California. And since he had a wife named Doris Ryner, and three kids with the same surname, I don’t think I need his birth certificate to prove the point.”
“Then why did he say his name was Joe?”
“Because Brad Ryner is a cop. A detective. Figure it out for yourself.”
Carole pondered, then said: “I think it would be faster if you explained it to me.”
The muscles of his face were tense.
“I’m afraid that Brad Ryner is involved in some kind of under-cover job, using a phoney name, Joe Something, and I just walked in and possibly blew the whole thing for him.”
“You mean he’s collecting information or something for the police?”
“Yes, and because I spilled the beans he may end up collecting bullets in the back.”
“Well,” Carole said, “I wouldn’t necessarily call it spilling the beans. Even if he was infiltrating a gang, or whatever he’s doing, how would the crooks know that somebody named Brad Ryner was a detective?”
“I’m hoping they won’t,” Simon said. “Ryner had a routine job in a fairly small town on the other side of the continent. There’s no reason anybody in Philadelphia should ever have heard his name.”
Carole put a hand on Simon’s shoulder and smiled.
“Then it wasn’t quite like walking in and saying, ‘Well, Sherlock Holmes, as I live and breathe!’ “
“Not quite,” he admitted. “But I’m worried that I might have done just enough to rouse somebody’s suspicions, and make them start checking out the name Ryner. Eventually that could mean real trouble.”
“At least he’s warned,” she said. “I mean, before anybody can find out that Brad Ryner is a cop he can get out of the picture.”
“And that’s my contribution to law and order,” said the Saint grimly.
“I’ll bet nobody thought a thing about it after we went and sat down,” Carole asserted. “They’ve forgotten the whole thing by now.”
“I hope so.”
She sensed his lack of conviction, but did not pursue it.
“We’re almost there,” she said. “Would you like to came up for a nightcap?”
“I’d enjoy it, but we’ve had a pretty full evening.” His concern for Brad Ryner showed clearly in his face and his voice. “Maybe another time.”
“I won’t chain myself to your bumper if you’ll promise to see me tomorrow. Here’s my private phone number.”
As Simon pulled his car to a halt in the garage, Carole scribbled the number on a scrap of paper from her handbag and gave it to him. Simon went with her as far as the elevator.
“Well?” she said.
“Well?” Simon echoed.
Carole leaned against the wall next to the elevator buttons.
“Well, are you going to go out with me tomorrow, and well, are you going to kiss me good night?”