Personal Columns, all newspapers:
Will the young lady who was seated in a wall booth at Anselmo’s Bar with a companion, at or around 6.15 in the evening. May 20th last, and who may recall an orange hat that caused her to turn her head as its wearer was leaving, kindly get in touch with me. She was facing toward the back. If she remembers this it is vital that I hear from her without delay. A person’s happiness is involved. All replies held in strictest confidence. Communicate J. L., Box 654, care of this newspaper.
No replies.
11
The Fifteenth Day Before the Execution
Lombard
A blowzy woman, with her graying hair in her eyes and an aura of cabbage around her, opened the door.
“O’Bannon? Michael O’Bannon?”
That was as far as he got. “Now listen. I’ve already been over to your office once today, and the man there said he’d give us until Wednesday. We’re not trying to gyp the poor penniless company that needs the money so bad. Sure it must be down to its last fifty thousand bucks, it must!”
“Madam. I’m not a collector. I simply wish to speak to the Michael O’Bannon who worked as doorman at the Casino last spring.”
“Yes, I can remember when he had that job,” she agreed caustically. She turned her head slightly aside, raised her voice a little, as if she wished someone other than Lombard to overhear her. “They lose one job, and then they never move the seat of their pants off the chair from that day on to try and get another. They sit and wait for it to come to them!”
What sounded like the hoarse grunt of a trained seal came from somewhere in the interior.
“Someone to see you, Mike!” she bellowed. And then to Lombard, “You better go in to him yourself, he’s got his shoes off.”
Lombard advanced down a “railroad” hall that threatened to go on indefinitely, but didn’t. It ended finally in a room whose center was occupied by an oilcloth covered table.
Sidewise to this lolled the object of his visit, stretched across two straight-backed wooden chairs in a suspension bridge arrangement, the unsupported part of him curving downward. He had off a good deal more than just his shoes; in fact, his upper attire consisted solely of an oatmeal-colored union suit with elbow length sleeves, and immediately over that a pair of braces. Two white-toed socks tilted acutely upward from the chair seat opposite him. He laid aside a pink racing form and a rancid pipe as Lombard entered. “And what can I do for you, sirr?” he rumbled accommodatingly.
Lombard put his hat on the table and sat down without being asked. “A friend of mine wishes to get in touch with someone,” he began confidentially. It would be poor policy, he felt, to overawe these people ahead of time with mention of death sentences, consultations with the police, and all that; they might become intimidated and chary of telling him anything, even if they were able to. “It means a lot to him. It means everything. Now. This is why I’m here. Can you recall a man and woman getting out of a taxi in front of the theater, while you were working there, one night in May? You held the door for them, of course.”
“Well now, I held the door for everybody that drove up, that was my job.”
“They were a little late, probably the last people you greeted that particular night. Now this woman had on a bright orange hat. A very peculiar hat, with a thin tickler sticking straight up from it. It swept right in front of your eyes as she got out, she passed so close to you. Your eyes followed it like this: slowly, from one side over to the other. You know, like when something passes too close to you, and you can’t make out what it is.”
“Leave it to him,” his wife put in challengingly from the doorway, “if it was anything on a pretty woman he’d do that anyway, whether he could make out what it was or not!”
Neither of the men paid any attention. “He saw you do that,” Lombard went on. “He happened to notice it at the time, and he told me about it.” He pressed his hands to the oilcloth, leaned toward him. “Can you remember? Does it come back to you? Can you remember her at all?”
O’Bannon shook his head ponderously. Then he gnawed his upper Hp. Then he shook his head some more. He gave him a reproachful look. “D’ye know what you’re asking, man? All those faces night after night! Nearly always two by two, lady and gent.”
Lombard continued leaning across the table toward him for long minutes, as though the intensity of his gaze would be enough to bring it back to him of itself. “Try, O’Bannon. Think back. Try, will you, O’Bannon? It means everything in the world to this poor guy.”
The wife began to draw slowly nearer, at that, but still held her peace.
O’Bannon shook his head once more, this time with finality. “No,” he said. “Out of my whole season there, out of all them people I opened car doors for, I can only recall today one single individjule. A fellow who showed up by himself one night, full of booze. And that was because he fell out of the cab face first when I opened the door, and I had to catch him in me arms—”
Lombard stemmed the flow of unwanted reminiscence that he suspected was about to follow. He got to his feet. “Then you don’t, and you’re sure you don’t?”
“I don’t, and I’m sure I don’t.” O’Bannon reached for the reeking pipe and the racing chart again.
The wife was at their elbows by now. She had been eyeing Lombard speculatively for some moments past. The tip of her tongue peered forth in calculation for an instant at the corner of her mouth as she spoke. “Would there have been anything in it for us, now, if he had been able to?”
“Well, yes. I don’t suppose I would have minded doing a little something for you, if you’d been able to give me what I wanted.”
“D’ye hear that, Mike?” She pounced on her husband as though she were going to attack him. She began to shake him strenuously by one shoulder, using both hands for the purpose, as though she were kneading dough or massaging a sprain. “Try, Mike, try!”
He tried to ward her off, backing an arm defensively before his head. “How can I, with you rocking me like an empty rowboat? Even if it was in me head somewhere, lying low, you’d shake it clean out of me mind!”
“Well — no go, I guess,” Lombard sighed. He turned away and moved disappointedly down the long defile of hall passage.
He heard her voice rise to an exasperated wail there in the room behind him, as she renewed her assault on her husband’s obdurate shoulder. “Look, he’s going! Oh, Mike, what’s the matter with you! All the man wants you to do is remember something, and you can’t even do that!”
She must have vented her disappointment on the inanimate objects about him. There was a roar of anguished protest. “Me pipe! Me handicap sheet!”
Their voices were loud in disputation as Lombard closed the outer door after him. Then, suspiciously, there was a sudden conspiratorial hush. Lombard’s face took on a slightly knowing look, as he started down the stairs.
Sure enough, in a moment more there was a swift onrush of footsteps in his wake along the inner hall, the door was flung open, and O’Bannon’s wife called hectically down the stairwell after him, “Wait, mister! Come back! He just remembered! It just now came to him!”
“Oh, it did, did it?” Lombard said dryly. He stopped where he was and turned to look up at her, but without making any move to reascend. He took out his wallet, ran his thumb tentatively along its edge. “Ask him was it a black or a white sling she was holding her arm in?”
She relayed the question resoundingly back into the interior. She got the answer, sent it on down to Lombard — slight hesitancy of voice and all. “White — for the evening, you know.”