“You played it like Bernhardt, kid.”
“Don't I know that voice?” The thin girl frowned, trying to think. “He was disguising it, or trying to, but I'm sure-”
“Thanks for goin' along with the gag, Myrna. You'll be a little heavier when you leave at the end of your shift.”
She nodded almost absently, but he could feel her eyes on him all the way over to the elevator. This girl was a twenty minute egg, for sure; if he had to make much use of her she was going to present a problem eventually. On the way up in the elevator he reviewed the tight little sequence of events, but his mind kept straying from the thin girl with the orange hair and possible problem she might present to the eyes of the gray-haired woman in 1224. Mrs. Girl Muller; Johnny shook his head slowly as he paused in the corridor outside his room and fumbled at the clip on his wristwatch band for his key.
“You've seen eyes like that before, Killain,” he told himself. “Not yesterday, or the day before, but you've seen them. On the wrong side of the barbed wire.”
He looked down unseeingly a moment at the key in his hand before inserting it in the lock….
He had opened the refrigerator door and reached for the frosted bottle of beer when the phone rang, and he closed the door. “Yeah?”
“It's Paul, Johnny. I'm on the board.” There was a subdued hint of urgency in Paul's usually phlegmatic voice.
“Where's Sally?”
“Ladies' room. Look, Johnny; there's a charged-up cowboy down here in the lobby you ought to take a look at.”
“What's he look like?”
“Kind of slim, pale face, red hair, freckles, a little-”
“I know him. What's his pitch?”
“He walked in from the street and asked Vic where you were. Vic told him you weren't around right that minute, and he said he'd wait. He's sitting in the front row of lobby chairs, facing the elevators, half cocked around in the chair so he can see the whole lobby by turning his head.”
“Drunk?”
“I don't think he's drunk-”
“Snowed, then. That's lovely.” Johnny remembered the stark expanse of freckles in the dead white, reckless face.
“It figures. Listen, Paul. He's trouble. I'll have to come down and get him. From what you say, the only way I can get at him is to drop down to the sub-basement and go around the building and come in the help's entrance. One flight up from there'll put me in the lobby, behind him. You wait three minutes, and then let the board go for itself. Get over to the desk and keep an eye on that lobby entrance, and when you see me there you give me some good loud entrance music. Anyone else in the lobby now?”
“Old man Tompkins is asleep in his chair.”
“It would take you twenty minutes to wake him up and get him moving. Leave him alone. Get Vic out of the way. Send him out on some errand and tell him I said to go.” He thought a minute. “Get this, now. When you set me up on the entrance, dig yourself a hole. If this boy catches me on the way across the lobby to him he might figure you for the diversion and knock an ear off you just for fun. When's Sally due back?”
“Ten minutes. Little more, maybe.”
“All right. I'm on the way down. Keep your eye on that entrance. I'm not gonna be posin' there.”
“I'll see you.”
“Just so you do.”
In the sub-basement's humidity Johnny left the elevator and ran down the alley and around the blank rear side of the hotel, dodging ashcans and garbage buckets from the neighboring areaways. He went up the single flight of stairs inside the help's off-street entrance three steps at a time and stopped just inside the lobby entrance and settled a balled fist lightly in the other palm. He stepped out into the frame of the entrance for an instant, and then back. In the one quick flash he had seen Paul in front of the bell captain's desk at the opposite end of the wide expanse of marbled floor, and the redhead sitting hunched, two thirds of the way across it, eyes glued on the elevators. Johnny's lips tightened; this would have to be quite a diversion.
A tremendous ringing crash set him in motion. He was in full stride entering the lobby, not running, but up on his toes and moving swiftly. Paul must have dropped at least two pitchers of ice water on the lobby floor; water, ice, and glass were everywhere, and Paul was staggering backward with his arms flailing the air to disappear behind the desk. His immediate audience had half risen at the explosion of noise and was crouched forward staring intently at the miniature flood, and from the corner of his eye as he advanced Johnny was able to see old man Tompkins jerk up from the depths of his chair off to the left and peer around in stupefication.
It seemed like a long way, but Johnny had reached a point just behind the watcher's chair when some instinct caused the redhead to turn. His one quick movement was wholly abortive. Johnny's reaching left glanced off obliquely, but jolted the red-haired man's ashen face into the path of the crushing right which drove him down and back into the cushion of the chair, out cold. Johnny reached down and picked him up bodily and turned to confront Paul, who was emerging from his refuge.
“Fella finally passed out, just like you predicted, Paul,” Johnny announced with a warning nod at old man Tompkins belatedly riveted on the creeping pools of water. “I'll take him upstairs.”
Vic trotted in from the foyer, his arms full of paper cups. “What in the hell was all that racket?”
“I dropped a tray,” Paul informed him, deadpan.
“Well, get Amy to clean up the mess.” The stocky man's eyes turned to Johnny. “What happened to him?”
“Slight case of over-indulgence. I'll tuck him in.”
“The way you wet-nurse these drunks-”
From the elevator Johnny could see old man Tompkins settling back in his chair with an indignant jerk of his hat over his eyes; with the flanged doors closed, he dropped his burden, and went down, not up. He searched his pockets for a seldom used key-ring, and dragged the limp redhead to a stout looking door in the passageway. The key revealed an empty linen closet, and Johnny stuffed the red-haired man inside, closed the door, remembered, and re-opened it.
Hurriedly he removed the snubnosed automatic from its shoulder holster and ran his hands lightly over the recumbent form for further artillery. Finding none, he again closed the door and locked it and returned to the lobby where a languid Amy was already wielding a mop against the debris.
Paul was back at the switchboard, and Johnny looked at his watch as he circled the still-rampant flood and entered through the switchboard's little gate. “Nice piece of orchestration, Paul.”
Paul smiled faintly. “I wasn't sure I could hold him long enough for you to reach him.”
“Just long enough. Whole deal took eight and a half minutes, by the clock. He's the other half of what you helped me upstairs from the other night.”
“The stubborn type?”
“Evidently. I think we burned down the schoolhouse on him this time, though. He's hopped to the ears, too dangerous to let run around loose. I've got him in the old linen closet downstairs. Here's the key; there'll be someone by to take him off your hands.”
He held up a warning finger at the sound of the tap-tap of Sally's high heels, and Paul stood up from the board. She looked at them suspiciously as she entered and placed her bag in the corner behind her chair. “If you two don't look like the cats that swallowed the canary, then I never saw any. What have you been up to now?”
“Up to, ma? You know us better'n that. Paul here was just tellin' me he'd finally made it big with a piece had been standin' him off too long.”
“Don't you men ever think of anything else?”
“You mean there is something else, ma?”
“You get out of here, both of you.”
Johnny paused at the desk. “I'll be in the room if you need me, Paul.” He turned to the elevator as Paul nodded, and went up, and he could hear his phone ringing as he stepped out into the sixth floor corridor. He opened his door hurriedly. “Yeah?”