“I never tell my name.”
“Why?”
“I’m not the sort you’d like to present to your friends.”
“Why?”
I said, “I’m married. I have three children who are starving. I can’t support my wife because I spend my afternoons in places like this. Time and again I’ve made up my mind to cut it out. But I just can’t do it. I’ll be walking along the street and see a beautiful face and figure like yours headed into one of these joints, and immediately I go plunging in after it, spending my last cent just for the pleasure of talking with you, holding you in my arms while I dance around a crowded floor.”
We were at the table now. She laughed and said, “Girls, I think his name is John Smith. He has the most delightful line.”
Two new feminine faces looked up at me with amused interest.
The head waiter stood close to me. “I beg your pardon, sir.”
“What rule have I violated now?” I asked.
“Nothing, sir. But the manager asked me to present his compliments and ask you to join him for a few moments. It’s quite important.”
“Well, I like that!” the girl with whom I had been dancing said.
The waiter remained silently insistent at my elbow.
I smiled at the three young women, said, “After all, I can be back, you know,” and then followed my guide out through the main doorway, through a curtained doorway into an anteroom, then through a door marked Private which the head waiter opened without knocking.
He said, “Mr. Lam for you, sir,” and retired, pulling the massive door closed behind him.
The man who was seated behind the big polished walnut desk looked up from some papers and his eyes hit mine; hard, dark, restless eyes that threw out the magnetic fire of a dynamic personality.
A smile softened the heavy mouth. The man pushed back the swivel chair and came around the desk.
He wasn’t particularly tall and he wasn’t fat, but he was thick all the way through, thick-chested, thick-necked, and a body that went straight up and down, with few curves. A tailor had done a marvelous job on him, and there was a well-groomed appearance about his hair that indicated a barber had spent quite a bit of time in painstaking toil. Every hair was smoothly tailored into place.
“How are you, Mr. Lam? My name is Rimley. I own the place.”
I shook hands.
He sized me up thoughtfully, said, “Sit down. Care for a cigar?”
“No, thanks. I smoke cigarettes.”
He opened a humidor on his desk. “I think you’ll find your favorite brand here. I...”
“No thanks, I have a package in my pocket I want to get smoked up.”
I fumbled in my pocket. It occurred to me that it might be very bad business, at the moment, to let him know about that second pack of cigarettes.
“Well, do sit down and make yourself comfortable. Care for a drink?”
“I’ve just had two of your Scotch and sodas.”
He laughed and said, “I mean a real drink.”
“Scotch and soda,” I said.
He picked up a desk telephone, flipped over a switch and said, “Two Scotch and sodas, my private brand.”
He clicked the switch off and said. “Just back from the South Pacific, I understand.”
“May I ask how you know?”
He made arches of his eyebrows. “Why not?”
There wasn’t any answer, so I went back to first principles. “I’ve been away for quite a while. While you were in business when I left, I don’t think I’d ever been out here. It just happened I hadn’t ever dropped in.”
“That is why your present visit interests me.”
“But how did it happen you knew who I was?”
He said, “Come, come, Mr. Lam. We’re realists, both of us.”
“Suppose we are?”
“Put yourself in my position. In order to run a place like this, one has to be on the black side of the ledger. One has to make money.”
“Naturally.”
“In order to make money, one has to put himself in the position of his customers. What do they come here for? What do they want? What do they seek? What do they get? What do they pay for? Obviously, Mr. Lam, if you’d put yourself in my place, and remember I am trying to think in terms of customers’ wants, you will readily understand that the unannounced visit of a private detective is... well, it’s something to be reported to me.”
“Yes, I can see that. Do you know all the private detectives?”
“Certainly not. But I know the ones who are smart enough to be dangerous.”
“How do you segregate?”
“I don’t. They segregate themselves.”
“I’m afraid I don’t follow you.”
“Being a private detective is like following any other profession. The incompetent ones have a tendency to weed themselves out. The ones who can just get by remain unknown, with only a nominal business. The ones who have what it takes begin to attract attention. They begin to get more and more business. People begin to talk about them. I know all of those.”
“You flatter me.”
“Don’t be so damn modest. Before you enlisted in the Navy, you’d made quite a name for yourself, a little guy with guts — guts and brains; a daring operator who played a no-limit game and always brought his clients out on top. I watched your career with a great deal of interest. I thought I might need you myself, sometime.
“And then, of course, there’s your partner, Bertha Cool. Rather an outstanding figure.”
“You’ve known her for some time?”
“Frankly, I never bothered with her until you teamed up with her and organized that partnership. Bertha was on my list, of course — one of the few agencies that would take domestic-relations cases. But nothing that needed to occupy my personal attention. She handled routine stuff in a routine way. Then you came along and you began handling routine stuff in a very unconventional manner. The cases you handled ceased to be routine.”
“You know a lot about me,” I said.
He nodded calmly, matter-of-factly, as one agreeing with an obvious fact. “I know a hell of a lot about you.”
“And why am I honored this afternoon?”
Knuckles tapped on the door.
“Come in,” Rimley called.
I noticed a slight movement of the right side of his body, heard a muffled click. The door opened and a waiter came in bearing a tray with glasses, a bottle of Johnny Walker Black Label, a container filled with ice cubes, and a big quart bottle of siphon water.
The waiter put the tray down on the corner of the desk, walked out without a word. Rimley poured two big slugs of whisky into the glasses, dropped in ice cubes, squirted in soda, handed me a glass.
“Regards,” he said.
“Regards,” I replied.
We took a sip from the glasses. Rimley swung around in the chair, smiled and said, “I hope I don’t have to dot the i’s and cross the t’s.”
“You mean that you don’t want me here?”
“Definitely.”
“Is there,” I asked, “anything you can do about it?”
His eyes were hard now, but his lips were still smiling. “Quite a bit,” he said.
“I’m interested. Barring the minor subterfuges of telling me the tables are all engaged, or instructing the waiters not to wait on me, I don’t see anything very subtle or very effective that you could do.”
He smiled and said, “Have you ever noticed, Lam, that the persons who talk about what they’re going to do very seldom do what they say they’re going to do?”
I nodded.
“I never talk about what I’m going to do. I do it. And, above all, I wouldn’t be so foolish as to tell you what I was going to do to keep you from being a regular visitor. Working on some particular case?”