Well, four blocks away, Kling thought. And five minutes and forty-two seconds
“She was in Annie, you know. On the road.”
“Yes,” Carella said, “so we’ve been told.”
Steak joints in this city tended to get noisy as hell. O’Leary’s was no exception. The place was filled with raucous businessmen in suits and vests who sat ham-hocked at tables with pristine white tablecloths and sparkling glassware, blowing smoke in the air, blasting laughter to the rafters, causing the place to reverberate with thunderous sound. Carella wondered why steak joints seemed to bring out the worst in men. None of them would have behaved this way in a tearoom.
“We understand she was supposed to be here last night,” he shouted over the noise.
“Is that right?” the headwaiter said.
He was as big as the noise in the place, a man with side whiskers and a belly that started under his chin, wearing a dark suit and a plum-colored tie fastened to his shirt with a modest diamond stickpin. Carella thought he looked like a British barrister in a Dickens novel. He sounded like one, too, come to think of it.
“With Johnny Milton,” Kling said.
“Oh, yes, the agent. Yes, he was here. I didn’t know she was supposed to join him.”
“What time did he get here?” Carella asked.
“Let me check the book.”
He moved toward his little podium like a galleon under full plum-colored sail, flicked pages like a conductor leading an orchestra, mumbling to himself as he scanned the reservation entries, “Johnny Milton, Johnny Milton, Johnny Milton,” and finally stabbing at the page with a plump little forefinger, and looking up triumphantly, and saying, “Here it is, seven o’clock.”
“Was he here at seven?” Carella asked.
“Well, I don’t know,” the headwaiter said.
“Could you try to remember, sir?”
“He may have been a few minutes late, I don’t know.”
“How late?” Kling asked.
Michelle had stepped into that alley at a few minutes past seven. Say two, three minutes past seven. Add to that the five minutes and forty-two seconds it took to walk here fast..
“Did he get here at five past seven?” he asked. ”
I don’t know.”
“Seven past?”
“Eight past?”
“Ten past?”
Both of them zeroing in. Trying to zero in.
“I have no way of knowing, really.”
“Would anyone else know?”
“One of your waiters?”
“Do you remember where you seated him?”
“Well, yes, I do. But I doubt anyone…”
“Which table would it have been, sir?”
“Number six. There near the bar.”
“Would that waiter be here now?”
“The one who had that table last night?”
“Gentlemen, really.. ”
“At seven?”
“Or seven-fifteen?”
“Around that time?”
“Yes, he’s here. But, really, you can see how crowded we are. I can’t possibly pull him off the…”
“We’ll wait till lunch is over,” Carella said.
The waiter’s name was Gregory Stiles, and he was a thirty-two-year-old aspiring actor, which did not make him exactly unique in this city. He remembered serving Johnny Milton, because he knew Milton was an agent, and he himself had been looking for a new agent ever since his last one moved to Los Angeles. Stiles had straight black hair, dark brown eyes, and an olive complexion, which made it difficult for him to get many acting jobs because everyone assumed he was Latino, and there weren’t too many roles for Latino actors in this city — or in this country, for that matter — unless you were a Latino actor who also sang and danced, in which case you could get a part in a summer stock production of West Side Story, maybe.
In the movie Walk Proud, which was about Chicano gangs in L.A., the starring Chicano role had been played by Robby Benson, a very good actor who happened to be an Anglo. The Chicano community raised six kinds of hell about this, even though the film created more jobs for Chicano actors than had previously been available since the Mexican Army stormed the Alamo and killed John Wayne. Unfortunately, Stiles hadn’t been living on the Coast when the movie was made, and so he’d missed out on a career opportunity. He was still annoyed that he looked so fuckin Hispanic when in fact his forebears were British.
He told all this to the detectives after the lunchtime hubbub had subsided, at ten minutes to three that afternoon, over coffee at a small table near the doors leading to the kitchen, where the dishwashers were busily at work. The dishwashers at work were almost as noisy as the businessmen had been at lunch, though not quite.
“He told me he was waiting for someone, but that he’d have a drink meanwhile,” Stiles projected over the clatter of dishes and pots and pans and someone singing in what sounded like Arabic. “He ordered a Tanqueray martini on the rocks, with a twist.”
“What time was this?” Kling asked.
“Exactly fifteen minutes past seven,” Stiles said
Both detectives looked at him.
“How do you happen to know the exact time?” Kling asked.
“Because I’d just got off the phone with my girlfriend.” Which did not answer the question.
“Do you always call her at a quarter past seven?” Carella asked.
Which seemed a logical thing to ask.
“No,” Stiles said. “As a matter of fact, she called me.”
“I see,” Carella said.
Which he still didn’t.
“What time did she call you?” Kling asked reasonably.
“About five after seven. She’d just been asked back for a second reading, and she wanted me to know about it.
She’s an actress, too. She also waits tables.”
“So she called you at five after seven…”
“Yes, and I took the call in the booth there…
” Nodding toward a phone booth at the end of the bar… where I could see the room and also the clock over the bar. I saw Mr. Milton when he came in, and I saw him when Gerard led him to the table. The headwaiter. Gerard.”
“What time did Mr. Milton come in?”
“I didn’t look at the clock when he came in. But I did look at it when Gerard led him to the table a few minutes later.”
“Why’d you look at the clock then?”
“Because I knew I’d be on in the next ten seconds. So I told Mollie I had to go, and I hung up, and the time on the clock was a quarter past seven.”
“You’re sure about that?”
“Positive.”
“So he sat down at a quarter after seven, and told you he was expecting someone, and ordered a Tanqueray martini.. ”
“On the rocks, with a twist.”
“Then what?”
“About ten minutes later, he went to the phone. Same phone over there. The booth at the end of the bar.”
“That would’ve been around seven twenty-five.”
“Around then. I didn’t look at the clock again. I’m just estimating.”
“Then what?”
“He came back to the table, threw down a twenty-dollar bill, and ran out.”
“Didn’t ask for a check?”
“Nope. Just assumed the twenty would cover it, I guess. Which it did, of course. More than.”
“Seemed in a hurry, did he?”
“Was Roadrunner in a hurry?”
“What time did he leave the restaurant, did you happen to notice?”
“I would say around seven-thirty. But again, that’s just an estimate.”
“But you’re absolutely certain…”
“Was Nostradamus certain?”
“… that he sat down at the table at a quarter past seven?”