When she turned on a light he discovered that he was in an old, old building that still had brass plumbing fixtures and artificial candles set in the walls and the ornate egg-shaped doorknobs that he remembered from his childhood. The walls were painted yellow. The hall was quite narrow, but after that he found himself in a large front room with a high ceiling; here, the chandelier had been taken down and electric wiring ran from the ceiling to the floor, where someone had fixed up a socket for the lamp and radio.
“Milt,” the girl said, disappearing into another room. Returning, she said to Bruce, “Just a minute.” She carried the grocery bag back into the kitchen while he waited. The room seemed cold, and he saw her strike a kitchen match and light the oven of the black ancient stove.
“Milt,” she repeated, going past him once more, into the other room. “There’s a man here who drove up from Reno to talk to you.” The door swung shut after her and he could neither hear nor see. He waited.
Through the closed door he heard stirrings and a man’s mutterings. Then the girl’s voice. They seemed to be arguing. At last the sound quieted down and he heard nothing.
The door opened and she came out and shut it after her. “Do you mind not seeing him for a while?” she asked.
“Okay,” he said, struggling with his impatience.
The girl entered the kitchen and began fixing the orange juice.
“What are his symptoms?” he asked her.
“He has a constant fever,” she said. “And no strength, and he’s swollen up around the eyes. And he has trouble urinating.”
“It sounds like a kidney infection,” he said.
“Yes,” she said, mixing the orange juice in a quart mayonnaise jar. “He has some pills he takes. It come and goes. It’s not as bad as it was yesterday.”
“Did you tell him my name?” he asked.
The girl said, “He’s too dopey right now.”
“You mean he didn’t know who it was?”
“He feels so out of sorts that he doesn’t like to see anybody until he feels better.” She would not say whether Lumky had remembered him. “I know he’ll want to talk to you later on when he feels improved.”
He told her that he could only stay in Pocatello so long.
“Maybe tomorrow,” she said. “He’ll probably feel more like himself when he wakes up in the morning. Right now he hardly knows what he’s saying. If you want to talk to him about business you better wait.”
A disturbance from the other room caused her to put down the jar of orange juice and go out of the kitchen. He heard her and Milt talking, and then her moving about from one room to another. Water ran in a bowl; something was filled, carried; then more talking.
When the girl returned he said. “I’ll drop by tomorrow morning, then.”
“Yes,” she agreed. “Here, I’ll let you out the front door. Now that he’s awake.” She led him through the apartment and into the room in which Milt lay on the couch wrapped up in blankets, his head on a white pillow. Passing by him, he saw that it was Milt Lumky beyond any doubt. The man’s eyes were shut and he breathed noisily. His arms had a dark unhealthy color and so did his face. The room smelled of illness. On the floor around the couch were glasses and pans and medicines.
Holding the front door open for him, the girl let him out onto a hallway. “Good night,” she said, and shut the door almost at once behind him.
Anyhow he had seen him; he knew for certain that it was Milt.
He returned to his motel.
11
When he returned to her apartment the following morning he found the door locked and a note tacked to it.
Dear Sir,
Mr. Lumky felt better today and he went to the dairy to see them. I am at work. Will be home at five-thirty.
Cordially yours,
He tried the knob. What did this remind him of? It reminded him of the night he had gone back to Peg Googer’s for his coat, found the house locked up and deserted, and had gone in through a window and discovered Susan lying in the bedroom smoking a cigarette. But how different this was … he wandered around to the back of the dilapidated three-story building and climbed the stairs; the back door was locked, too, and so was the single window overlooking the porch. Mrs. Hermes was too careful.
The Mercedes, of course, had gone; the garage was empty. One of them had driven off in it, most likely Milt. He wondered if Milt would come back here, or having finished his business with the dairy, would speed on to the next town to make up for lost time.
Unable to think of anything else he could do he parked his car directly before the building and, sitting behind the wheel, waited.
An hour or so later a jolt that made the whole car jump forward startled him into panicky wakefulness. The Mercedes had glided up behind him and banged bumpers; hopping out he found himself facing Milt Lumky, who grinned at him from behind the wheel of the Mercedes.
“Hello, McFoop,” Milt said, leaning out the window. He shut off the car’s motor and stepped out carrying his leather satchel and several packets of samples. “Think sharp, be sharp,” he said. He looked the same as always; there was no sign of illness. In his jaunty bow tie, pink shirt, and sporty suit he passed by Bruce and up the steps of the building. “Come on,” he said over his shoulder.
“I’m sure glad to see you,” Bruce said. “I was afraid maybe you’d gone on to the next town.”
Upstairs, on the top floor, Milt read the note tacked to the door and then tore it down and stuffed it into his coat pocket. As he unlocked the door he said, “What do you think of Cathy?”
“Very solicitous,” he said.
“I have to pack,” Milt said, holding the door aside for him. “I’m two days late on my route.”
While Bruce stood by, he carried shirts from a dresser to his suitcase. In the bathroom he gathered up his shaving objects.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t talk to you last night,” Milt said, as he stuffed pairs of shoe’s into the sidepockets of the suitcase.
“That’s okay,” he said. “Can you talk about it now?”
“What about?” Milt said.
He said, “I’m interested in the Jap typewriters. The Mithrias. I saw one in San Francisco.”
“That’s right,” Milt said. “You can pick them up out there on the Coast. How’s Susan?”
“Fine,” he said.
“Did you kick out Zoe?”
“Yes,” he said. “Now we’ve got some working capital.” For some reason he felt reluctant to tell Milt about his marriage with Susan. “What can you tell me about getting a buy on some Mithrias?” he said. “You talked about it when I saw you before.”
“How much do you have to work with?”
He said, “Enough, if the price is any good.”
“It’s out of my hands,” Milt said.
“Does that mean you used to have an interest?”
“No,” he said. “But I used to know more about it. I was thinking about buying in.”
“And not any more?”
“If I got them there’s nothing I could do with them. I’d have to hold them and try to turn them over as a job lot to some retailer.”
Bruce said, “What I want to do is sell them. Advertise. But it all depends on the price.”
“Is it your money?”
“Mine and Susan’s,” he said.
“All I can tell you is that there’s one warehouse I know of for sure. But it’s not out here. It’s in Seattle.”
“That’s okay,” he said. He had expected it to be on the Coast; if any existed here, then something had gone wrong.