Murray’s girl answered the phone. I put Brooklyn back into my voice and told her to let me speak to Rogers. She asked who was calling.
“August Milani,” I said. There was a pause while she checked with Rogers.
Then she said, “Sorry to keep you waiting, Mr. Milani. Could you tell me what your call is in reference to?”
“Sure, honey,” I said. I chuckled lewdly. “Tell Rogers I want to talk to him about Whitlock.”
Maybe Murray’s curiosity was aroused. At any rate, he was on the line a few seconds later, asking what he could do for me. I waited until I heard the receptionist click herself off the line. Then I dropped the Brooklyn accent.
“My name’s Milani,” I said. “August Milani. Sam Whitlock suggested you might be in the market for some life insurance, Mr. Rogers. I’d like to make an appointment with you—”
“I’ve got all the coverage I need,” he said.
“Now, that’s always a moot point. If we could get together for an hour or so, Mr. Rogers—”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m not interested.”
I was still talking earnestly when he broke the connection. I put the receiver on the hook and stayed in the booth long enough to light a cigarette. I thought of Murray telling the court that Milani was just an insurance man, a pest trying to sell him a policy, while Murray’s receptionist contradicted him and said that Milani sounded like some kind of gangster.
It was getting cute.
I sat on the Carver office telephone most of the afternoon. One man thought he might buy a half-unit but he wanted to discuss the matter with his wife first. Another was interested but hadn’t been able to read the brochure thoroughly yet. Would I call him in a day or two? I made a notation to do so. By four-thirty I had called everybody I felt like calling. I leaned back in my chair and smoked a cigarette. It would have been nice to call Joyce, let her know what was happening, make some plans and talk out some dreams.
Nice, but also foolish. We wouldn’t be seeing much of each other for the next two weeks. That was the way it had to be. If we were connected, the whole mess would cave in on us.
So I flipped through the phonebook and dialed a number. The phone rang four times before she reached it, and her hello was on the breathless side.
“Hello yourself,” I said. “This is Bill Maynard.”
“Oh,” Barbara Lambert said. She sounded surprised.
“I didn’t know if you’d be home from school yet or not. I thought I’d give you a try.”
“I was just walking through the door when the phone rang.”
I didn’t say anything for a minute and the silence stretched. I pictured her in her small house, a comfortable blonde who lived alone, holding the telephone to her ear and waiting a little nervously to find out what I wanted. It didn’t seem altogether fair to make her part of the wrapping paper on a frameup.
“I was wondering,” I said.
“Yes?”
“Are you busy tomorrow night, Barb? I thought we could have dinner and take in a movie.”
She said that would be very nice. She sounded pleased and maybe just a little bit giddy. I told her I would pick her up around seven. Then I cleared off my desk, said goodbye all around and left the office. I drove home. The telephone people had installed a phone for me and I called a few people to let them know my new number. Then I took a breath and called the Glade Hotel.
“Milani,” I said. “August Milani. Is he in?” My voice didn’t sound quite like Rogers’ voice. But it was as close as I could come. I waited while the desk clerk checked. Milani wasn’t in. This didn’t exactly surprise me.
“I’d like to leave a message,” I said.
“Sure.”
“My name is Rogers,” I said. “Tell Mr. Milani his terms are impossible and I’m afraid we cannot do business.”
I made him read the message back to me. Then I thanked him and broke the connection.
I took care of my evening appointments by ten. I drove the Ford back to the apartment, switched to the shabby suit and the loud tie. On the way to the Glade I pulled the hat down over my forehead and added the glasses. The desk clerk gave me the message from Rogers. I chuckled nastily and said something to the effect that the bastard wouldn’t get off so easy, that he was going to pay off sooner or later. The desk clerk tried to keep a poker face but I could tell that the words had registered. He wouldn’t forget them.
Tuesday and Wednesday, I kept feeding dimes into telephones. I called Murray Rogers’ office four or five times, each time giving my name as Milani and asking in a hoodish tone to talk to Rogers. I got through to him once and fed him the life insurance pitch all over again and he hung up on me almost at once. The other times I didn’t get past the receptionist. The poor girl must have had an interesting picture of me by then. I got nastier and nastier, and if she asked Murray about me he could only say that I was some nutty insurance salesman, a little stupider and a little more persistent than most. The girl wouldn’t believe it. She was a perfect receptionist, starched and prim and proper. But she couldn’t swallow a pitch like that.
I called my hotel a few times, leaving messages from Rogers, and I picked up the messages at the hotel and cackled triumphantly. The stage was setting itself up neatly.
Tuesday night I took Barb Lambert to dinner at an Italian restaurant. She had veal mozzarella and I had lobster fra diavolo and we knocked off a bottle of chianti together. The restaurant was the sort of place where David Niven and Jean Simmons always had dinner as a prelude to an illicit affair in a Hollywood bedroom farce. Candles burned in straw-covered wine bottles. Violin music melted forth from a public address system. The lights were dim.
Reality slipped away. Barbara became a little prettier, a little cleverer, less the unsure schoolteacher and more the vibrant woman. My hand crossed the table and covered hers. Her fingers were cool, soft. Her eyes shone.
“I’ve missed this,” she said.
“This?”
“Romance. I like it, Bill.”
“So do I.”
“We should have met more romantically,” she said lazily. “We could have been seat-partners in a transatlantic jet. You could have rescued me from a rapist in the park. Something like that. But instead we were fixed up by a pair of meddling matchmakers. That’s not very romantic, is it?”
“We could always pretend.”
She picked up her wine glass with her free hand and finished her chianti. “Let’s,” she said. “Let’s pretend. Let’s be different people. Instead of a schoolteacher I’ll be something exciting. I’ll be a call girl, all right?”
“I’ll be a customer, then.”
She laughed wickedly. “No, no, no,” she said. “That’s not romantic. I’ll be a high-priced call girl. And what will you be?”
“A wealthy prince?”
“I don’t think so. How about a master criminal?”
“A jewel thief?”
“Mmmmm,” she said. “Perfect. And do you know how we got together? You just finished robbing a horrid old woman of a fortune in emeralds, and I just finished breaking off with my wealthy old lover, and now we’re having dinner together in an intimate little spot on the Italian Riviera. Isn’t that romantic?”
A movie wouldn’t have been romantic enough. Instead we drove around searching for something exciting. We wound up in a jazz club. We were the only non-beats in the place and we drew stares that would have made Barb uncomfortable if it hadn’t been for the wine. As it was, she didn’t mind at all. We sat at a small table in front and drank dubious scotch and listened to a hard-bop quartet play funky blues.