Henderson said, “I can prove I got in here as early as six-ten, if I can only find that woman.”
Burgess swung open the car door. “Let’s go inside,” he said.
“Ever see this man before?” Burgess asked.
The barman held his chin in a vise. “Looks kind of familiar,” he admitted. “But then, my whole job is just faces, faces, faces.”
They gave him a little more time. He took an angle shot at Henderson. Then he went around the opposite side and took it from there. “I don’t know,” he still hesitated.
Burgess said, “Sometimes the frame counts as much as the picture. Let’s try it differently. Go on back behind the bar, barman.”
They all went over to it. “Which stool were you on, Henderson?”
“Somewhere along about here. The clock was straight over and the pretzel bowl was about two up from me.”
“All right, get on it. Now try it, barman. Forget about us, take a good look at him.”
Henderson inclined his head morosely, stared down at the surface of the bar, the way he had the other time.
It worked. The barman snapped his fingers. “That did it! Gloomy Gus. I remember him now. Only last night, wasn’t it? Must have been just a one-drink customer, didn’t stick around long enough to sink in.”
“Now we want the time.”
“Sometime during my first hour on duty. They hadn’t thickened up yet around me. We had a late start last night; sometimes happens.”
“What is your first hour on duty?”
“Six to seven.”
“Yeah, but about how long after six, that’s what we want to know.”
He shook his head. “I’m sorry, gents. I only watch the clock toward the end of my shift, never around the beginning. It might have been six, it might have been six-thirty, it might have been six forty-five. It just wouldn’t be worth a damn for me to try to say.”
Burgess looked at Henderson, raised his eyebrows slightly. Then he turned to the barman again. “Tell us about this woman that was in here at that time.”
The barman said with catastrophic simplicity, “What woman?”
Henderson’s complexion went slowly down the color scale, from natural to pale to dead white.
A flick of Burgess’s hand held him mute.
“You didn’t see him get up and go over and speak to a woman?”
The barman said, “No sir, I didn’t see him get up and go over and speak to anyone. I can’t swear to it, but my impression was there was no one else at the bar at that time for him to speak to.”
“Did you see a woman sitting here by herself, without seeing him get up and go over to her?”
Henderson pointed helplessly two bar stools over. “An orange hat,” he said, before Burgess could stop him.
“Don’t do that,” the detective warned him.
The barman was suddenly becoming irritable, for some reason or other. “Look,” he said, “I’ve been in this business thirty-seven years. I’m sick of their damn faces, night after night, just opening and closing, opening and closing, throwing the booze in. Don’t come in and ask me what color hats they had on, or if they picked each other up or not. To me they’re just orders. To me they’re just drinks, see, to me they’re just drinks! Tell me what she had and I’ll tell you if she was in here or not! We keep all the tabs. I’ll get ’em from the boss’s office.”
They were all looking at Henderson now. He said, “I had Scotch and water. I always have that, never anything else. Give me just a minute now, to see if I can get hers. It was all the way down near the bottom—”
The barman came back with a large tin box.
Henderson said, rubbing his forehead, “There was a cherry left in the bottom of the glass and—”
“That could be any one of six drinks. I’ll get it for you. Was the bottom stemmed or flat? And what color was the dregs? If it was a Manhattan the glass was stemmed and dregs brown.”
Henderson said, “It was a stem glass she was fiddling with. But the dregs weren’t brown, no, they were pink, like.”
“Jack Rose,” said the barman briskly. “I can get it for you easy, now.” He started shuffling through the tabs. It took a few moments; he had to sift his way through them in reverse, the earlier ones were at the bottom. “See, they come off the pads in order, numbered at the top,” he mentioned.
Henderson gave a start, leaned forward. “Wait a minute!” he said breathlessly. “That brought something back to me just then. I can remember the number printed at the top of my particular pad. Thirteen. The jinx number. I remember staring at it for a minute when he handed it to me, like you would with that number.”
The barman put down two tabs in front of all of them. “Yeah, you’re right,” he said. “Here you are. But not both on the same tab. Thirteen — one Scotch and water. And here are the Jack Roses, three of them, on number seventy-four. That’s one of Tommy’s tabs, from the shift before, in the late afternoon; I know his writing. Not only that, but there was some other guy with her. Three Jack Roses and a rum, this one says, and no one in their right mind is going to mix those two drinks.”
“So—?” Burgess suggested softly.
“So I still don’t remember seeing any such woman, even if she stayed over into my shift, because she was Tommy’s order, not mine. But if she did stay over, my thirty-seven years’ experience tending bar tells me he didn’t get up and go over and speak to her, because there was already a guy with her. And my thirty-seven years’ experience also tells me he was with her to the end, because nobody buys three Jack Roses at eighty cents a throw and then walks out and leaves his investment behind for somebody else to cash in on.” And he took a definitive swipe to the counter with his bar rag.
Henderson’s voice was shaking. “But you remembered me being here! If you can remember me, why can’t you remember her? She was even better to look at.”
The barman said with vicious logic, “Sure I remembered you. Because I’m seeing you now over again, right before my eyes. Bring her back in front of me the same way, and I’ll probably remember her too. I can’t without that.”
He was hanging onto the rim of the bar with both hands, like a drunk with unmanageable legs. Burgess detached one of his arms, grunted, “Come on, Henderson.”
He still clung to it with the other, straining toward the barman. “Don’t do this to me!” he protested in a choked voice. “Don’t you know what the charges are? Murder!”
Burgess quickly sealed a hand to his mouth. “Shut up, Henderson,” he ordered curtly.
They led him out backward. He kept straining away from them toward that bar.
“You sure did draw the thirteen tab,” one of them grunted in a wry undertone, as they emerged to the street with him, pressed closely around him in a sort of perambulatory vise.
“Even if she shows up from now on, at any later point in the evening, it’s already too late to do you any good,” Burgess warned him as they sat waiting for the taxi driver to be traced and brought in. “It had to be in that bar by six-seventeen. But I’m curious to see whether she will show up at some later point, and if so, just how long after. That’s why we’re going to retrace your movements, step by step, throughout the entire evening, from beginning to end.”
“She will, she’s got to!” Henderson insisted. “Somebody’ll remember her, in one of the other places we went that night. And then, once you get hold of her in that way, she herself will be able to tell you just where and at what time she first met me.”
The man Burgess had sent out on the assignment came in, reported, “The Sunrise Company has two drivers on the line outside Anselmo’s. I brought them both down. Their names are Budd Hickey and Al Alp.”