“Call before you come,” she said.
“Yes,” I said. “Certainly.”
“I’ll see you to the door.”
“No. Don’t bother. You’d better stay here in the sun. In another half hour, it’ll be gone.”
“Yes. So it will.” She looked up at the white disk in the sky beyond a ridge of tooled stone. “Good-bye, then. I’ll be waiting to hear from you.”
She offered me her hand, and I took it and held it and released it. In the middle of the black-and-white acre, I paused and looked back. She had already removed the short white coat and was lying on her stomach on the yellow pad. Her face was buried in the crook of an elbow.
I went on out and back to my office and put my feet on the desk and thought about her lying there in the sun. There was no sun in my office. In front of me was a blank wall, and behind me was a narrow window, and outside the narrow window was a narrow alley. Whenever I got tired of looking at the wall I could get up and stand by the window and look down into the alley, and whenever I got tired of looking into the alley I could sit down and look at the wall again. And whenever I got tired of looking at both the wall and the alley, which was frequently, I could go out somewhere and look at something else. Now I simply closed my eyes and saw clearly behind the lids a lean brown body interrupted in two places by the briefest of white hiatuses.
This was pleasant but not of the first importance. It was more important, though less pleasant, to think about Graham Markley. Conceding the priority of importance, I began reluctantly to think about him, and after a few minutes of reluctant thinking, I lowered my feet and reached for a telephone directory. After locating his name and number, I dialed the number and waited through a couple of rings, and then a voice came on that made me feel with its first careful syllable as if I’d neglected recently to bathe and clean my fingernails.
“Graham Markley’s residence,” the voice said.
“This is Percival Hand,” I said. “I’m a private detective. I’d like to speak with Mr. Markley.”
Ordinarily I use the abbreviated version of my name, just plain Percy, but I felt compelled by the voice to be as proper and impressive as possible. As it was, in the exorbitantly long pause that followed, I felt as if I had been unpardonably offensive.
“If you will just hold the wire,” the voice said at last, “I shall see if Mr. Markley is at home.”
Which meant, of course, that Mr. Markley was certainly at home, but that it remained to be seen if he would be so irresponsible as to talk with a private detective on the telephone, which was surely unlikely. I held the wire and waited. I inspected my nails and found them clean. I tried to smell myself and couldn’t. Another voice came on abruptly, and it was, as it developed, the voice of Graham Markley.
“Graham Markley speaking. What can I do for you, Mr. Hand?”
“I’d like to make an appointment to see you personally.”
“About what?”
I had already considered the relative advantages in this particular instance of candor and deception, and I had decided that there was probably little or nothing to choose between them. In cases where deception gains me nothing, I’m always prepared to be candid, and that’s what I was now.
“About your wife. Your third wife, that is.”
“I can’t imagine why my wife should be a point of discussion between you and me, Mr. Hand.”
“I thought you might be able to give me some useful information.”
There was a moment of waiting. The wire sang softly in the interim.
“For what purpose?” he said. “Am I to understand that you’re investigating my wife’s disappearance?”
“That’s right.”
“At whose request?”
“I’m not at liberty to say at the moment.”
“Come, Mr. Hand. If you expect any co-operation from me, you’ll have to be less reticent.”
“I haven’t received any co-operation from you yet, Mr. Markley.”
“It was reasonably apparent to everyone, including the police and myself, why my wife went away. I confess that I can’t see any use in stirring up an unpleasant matter that I had hoped was forgotten. Do you know anything that would justify it?”
Again I evaluated the advantages of candor and deception, and this time I chose deception. The advantages in its favor seemed so palpable, as a matter of fact, that the evaluation required no more than a second.
“I’ve learned something,” I lied, “that I think will interest you.”
“Perhaps you had better tell me what it is.”
“Sorry. I’d rather not discuss it over the telephone.”
“I can’t see you today. It’s impossible.”
“Tomorrow will do. If you’ll set a time, I’ll be happy to call on you.”
“That won’t be necessary. I’ll come to your office.”
“I don’t want to inconvenience you.”
“Thank you for your consideration. However, I prefer to see you in your office. How about two o’clock tomorrow afternoon?”
“Good. I’ll be expecting you.”
I told him where my office was, and we said good-bye and hung up. Rocking back in my chair, I elevated my feet again and closed my eyes. Faith Salem was still lying in the sun. I watched her for a few moments and then opened my eyes and lit a cigarette and began thinking about Regis Lawler. I didn’t accomplish much by this, for I didn’t have much material for thought to start with. I had met him casually a few times quite a while ago, in this or that place we had both gone to, but most of what I knew about him was incidental to what I knew about his brother, who was older and generally more important and had more about him worth knowing.
The brother’s name was Silas. After long and precarious apprentice years in a number of illegal operations, he had begun slowly to achieve a kind of acceptance, even respectability, that increased in ratio to the measure of his security. Now he was the owner of a fine restaurant. At least, it was a restaurant among other things, and it was that equally, if not primarily. When you went there, it was assumed that you had come for good food, and that’s what you got. You got it in rich and quiet surroundings to the music of a string quartet that sometimes played Beethoven as well as Fritz Kreisler and Johann Strauss. The chefs were the best that Lawler could hire, and the best that Lawler could hire were as good as any and better than most. On the correct principle that good food should tolerate no distractions, the service was performed by elderly colored waiters who were artists in the difficult technique of being solicitous without being obtrusive.
If you wanted distractions, you went downstairs, below street level. This was known as the Apache Room, a little bit of the Left Bank transplanted, and it was phony and made no pretense of being anything else, and it was frankly for people who liked it that way. There were red-checked cloths on the tables, pretty girls with pretty legs who serviced the tables, and a small orchestra with the peculiar quality that is supposed to be peculiarly Parisian. Around the walls were murals of girls in black stockings doing the can-can alternating with other murals of other girls being maltreated by Apaches and always showing quite a lot of one white thigh above a fancy garter in the deep slit of a tight skirt.
On the floor above the restaurant, up one flight of carpeted stairs, you could go to gamble if you chose. In a series of three large rooms muffled in drapes and carpets, you could play roulette or poker or blackjack or shoot dice, and sometimes you might even win at one or the other or all, but more often, of course, you lost and were expected to lose graciously. If you did not, as sometimes happened, you were escorted outside by a brace of hard-handed gentlemen in evening clothes, and you were thereafter persona non grata until you received absolution and clearance from Silas Lawler himself. The games were reputed to be honest, and they probably were.