A change of figures before Henderson’s eyes, that was all. The dream, the practical joke, the whatever it was, went on and on.
This was going to be comedy stuff. To the rest of them, anyway, if not to him. He caught sight of one of them writing something down. He hooked his finger around to his thumb, like in that old hair-tonic ad. “No, no. Beg pardon, shentlemen. There is a D in it. It is silent, you don’t speak it.”
“Then what’s the good of having it?” one of them wondered to the man next to him.
“I don’t care what there is in it,” Burgess said. “All I want to know is, do you have table twenty-four?”
“From ten, over there, all the way around to twenty-eight, that is me.”
“You waited on this man at twenty-four last night?”
He was going to make a social introduction of it. “Ah, sure, certainly!” He lighted up. “Good evening! How are you? You coming back again soon, I hope!” He evidently didn’t recognize them as detectives.
“No, he isn’t,” said Burgess brutally. He flattened his hand, to kill the flow of amenities. “How many were there at the table when you waited on him?”
The waiter looked puzzled, like a man who is willing to do his best but can’t get the hang of what is expected of him. “Him.” he said. “No more. Shust him.”
“No lady?”
“No, no lady. What lady?” And then he added, in perfect innocence, “Why? He lose one?”
It brought on a howl. Henderson parted his lips and took a deep breath, like when something hurts you unbearably.
“Yeah, he lost one all right,” one of them clowned.
The waiter saw he had made a hit, batted his eyes at them coyly, but still, apparently, without any very clear idea of how he had chalked up his success.
Henderson spoke, in a desolate, beaten down sort of voice. “You drew out her chair for her. You opened the menu card, offered it to her.” He tapped his own skull a couple of times. “I saw you do those things. But no, you didn’t see her.”
The waiter began to expostulate with Eastern European warmth and lavishness of gesture, but without any rancor. “I draw out a chair, yes, when there is a lady there for it. But when there is no lady there, how can I draw out a chair? For the air to sit down on it, you think I’m going to draw out a chair? When is no face there, you think I’m going to open bill of fare and push it in front of?”
Burgess said, “Talk to us, not him. He’s in custody.”
He did, as volubly as ever, simply switching the direction of his head. “He leave me tip for one and a half. How could there be lady with him? You think I’m going to be nice to him today, if is two there last night and he leave me tip for only one and a half?” His eyes lit with Slavonic fire. Even the supposition seemed to inflame him. “You think I forget it in a harry? I remember it for next two weeks! Hah! You think I ask him to come back like I do? Hah!” he snorted belligerently.
“What’s a tip for one and a half?” Burgess asked with jocular curiosity.
“For one is fifty cents. For two is a dollar. He give me seventy-five cents, is tip for one and a half.”
“Couldn’t you get seventy-five cents for a party of two?”
“Never!” he panted resentfully. “If I do, I do like this.” He removed an imaginary salver from the table, fingers disdainfully lifted as if it were contaminated. He fixed a baleful eye on the imaginary customer, in this case Henderson. Sustained it long enough to shrivel him. His thick underlip curled in what was meant for a lopsided leer of derision. “I say, Thank you, sor. Thank you very motch, sor. Thank you very very motch, sor. You sure you able to do this? And if is lady with him, he feel like two cents, he stick in some more.”
“I kind of would myself,” Burgess admitted. He turned his head. “How much do you say you left, Henderson?”
Henderson’s answer was forlornly soft-spoken. “What he says I did; seventy-five cents.”
“One thing more,” Burgess said, “just to round the whole thing out. I’d like to see the check for that particular dinner. You keep them, don’t you?”
“Manager got them. You have to ask him.” The waiter’s face took on an expression of conscious virtue, as though now he felt sure his veracity would be sustained.
Henderson was suddenly leaning alertly forward, his licked listlessness was gone again.
The manager brought them out himself. They were kept in sheaves, in little oblong clasp folders, one to a date, apparently to help him tally his accounts at the end of each month. They found it without difficulty. It said Table 24. Waiter 3. I Table d’hote — 4.25. It was stamped in faint purple. Paid — May 20th in a sort of oval formation.
There were only two other checks for table twenty-four in that day’s batch. One was 1 tea — 0.75, from late afternoon, just before the dinner hour. The other was dinner for four, a party that had evidently come in late, just before closing.
They had to help him get back into the car. He walked in a kind of stupor. His legs were balky. Again there was the dreamlike glide of unreal buildings and unreal streets moving backward past them, like shadows on glass.
He broke out suddenly, “They’re lying — they’re killing me, all of them! What did I ever do to any of them—?”
“Y’know what it reminds me of?” one of them said in an aside. “Them Topper pictures, where they fade off and on the screen right in front of your eyes. Did y’ever see one of them. Burge?”
Henderson shuddered involuntarily and let his head go over.
There was a show going on outside, and the music, and laughter, and sometimes handclapping, would trickle into the small, cluttered office, diluted.
The manager was sitting waiting by the phone. Business was good, and he tried to look pleasantly at all of them, savoring his cigar and leaning far back in his swivel chair.
“There can be no question that the two seats were paid for.” the manager said urbanely. “All I can tell you is that nobody was seen going in with him—” He broke off with sudden anxiety. “He’s going to be ill. Please get him out of here as quickly as you can, I don’t want any commotion while there’s a performance going on.”
They opened the door and half carried, half walked Henderson toward it, his back inclined far over toward the floor. A gust of singing from out front surged in.
“Ah, don’t,” he pleaded chokingly. “I can’t stand any more of it!” He toppled onto the back seat of the police sedan, made a knot of his two hands, gnawed at them as if seeking sustenance for his sanity.
“Why not break down and admit there was no dame with you?” Burgess tried to reason with him. “Don’t you see how much simpler it would be all around?”
Henderson tried to answer him in a rational, even voice, but he was a little shaky at it. “Do you know what the next step would be after that, if I did, if I could, make such an admission as you’re asking me to? My sanity would start to leave me. I’d never be sure of anything again in my life. You can’t take a fact that you know to be true, as true as... as that your name is Scott Henderson—” He clapped himself on the thigh; “—as true as that this is my own leg, and let yourself begin to doubt it, deny it, without your mental balance going overboard. She was beside me for six hours. I touched her arm. I felt it in the curve of my own.” He reached out and briefly tweaked Burgess’s muscular underarm. “The rustle of her dress. The words she spoke. The faint fragrance of her perfume. The clink of her spoon against her consommé plate. The little stamp of her chair when she moved it back. The little quiver of the shaky taxi chassis when she stepped down from it. Where did the liquor go to, that my eyes saw in her glass when she raised it? When it came down again, it was empty.” He pounded his fist against his knee, three, four, five times. “She was, she was, she was!” He was almost crying; at least his face was wreathed in those lines. “Now they’re trying to tell me she wasn’t!”