“They promised you.”
“Yes.” The smile flashed on again, like a searchlight being switched on, and she said, “The police are really very sweet, when you get to know them.”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“Of course,” she said, “they couldn’t understand why you’d run away like that if you hadn’t done anything wrong, but I understood it right away.”
“You did.”
“Well, of course. All at once someone accuses you of something perfectly dreadful, and a whole army of policemen start running at you... I’d have run away myself.”
“But you explained it,” said Engel. “You went to the cops and explained it so they won’t chase me.”
“Well, I thought I should. I thought it was my duty.” She sipped, eyed, smiled, said, “You make a really fine Scotch sour, really fine.”
“I wish,” Engel told her, “I kind of wish you’d explain it to me. What you explained to the cops.”
“Well, that’s why I’m here. You see, when my — Oh. May I have another of these first?”
“Sure. Sure.” Engel got to his feet, took the empty glass from her outstretched hand, and went back over behind the bar. He’d left the drink guide open, and now he began again to assemble the drink. One cocktail shaker, half full of cracked ice...
The mystery woman came over, undulating slowly across the room like something seen through water, and hitched herself gracefully onto one of the purple-topped bar stools. “You’re really a very interesting man,” she said.
... one part bar syrup...
“And I can’t tell you how sorry I am if I caused you any inconvenience.”
“No, that’s all right. As long as it all comes out right in the end.” ...two parts lemon juice...
“I just can’t believe you’re a gangster. Oh! Was that a terrible thing to say?”
Engel looked up from his preparations. “Is that what they told you at Police Headquarters?”
She had both elbows propped on the bar, forearms vertical and fingers entwined, delicate chin resting on her grouped hands, lips smiling again and eyes being... provocative. “They told me you were a desperate character,” she said. “They told me you were in the Mafia and Cosa Nostra and the Syndicate and I don’t know what all.”
“Diners’ Club? Did they mention Diners’ Club? Or the Masons?”
She laughed, a tinkly sound. “No, they didn’t. I can see they gave me a slanted report on you.”
“They’re prejudiced.” ...eight parts Scotch; two, four, six, eight...
“I don’t think you’re a gangster at all.”
“No?” ...shake vigorously...
“I think you’re charming.”
“Yes?” ...shake...
“Yes, I do. Like Akim Tamiroff on the Late Late Show. Only taller, of course, and without the mustache. And no accent. And your face is thinner. But the feeling is the same.”
“Is it?” ...vigorously.
“I’ve never told you my name, have I?”
Strain into whiskey-sour glass. “No, you haven’t.”
“Margo,” she said. “Margo Kane.”
“Engel,” he said, in his turn. “Al — uh, Al Engel.”
“Yes, I know. How do you do?” She extended a hand, high, the way women do.
For such a thin hand, it was very warm. Like holding an undernourished but attractive bird. “How do you do?”
“Fine, thank you.”
Engel released her hand and went back to the drink. Garnish with cherry...
“Fine, that is,” she went on, “all things considered. My bereavement and all.”
... and a slice of lemon.
Engel set the completed drink up on the bar in front of her. “Bereavement? What bereavement?”
“Well, that’s actually part of what I was going to tell you. It’s all part of the same thing.” Long pale fingers closed around the glass, lifted it to scarlet lips. “Mmmm. You do have the touch.”
Engel was making a fresh drink for himself now, a much simpler process: an ice cube, a splash of Scotch, a dash of water. “You’ve had a bereavement?” he said, trying to get her back onto the subject.
“Yes.” A wistful, sad, forlorn look came into her eyes. She tapped the long nails of her left hand on the bar just once, in a ripple, as though expressing the finish of something. “My husband,” she said. “He died quite suddenly yesterday.”
“Oh. I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Yes. It was quite a shock. So sudden, so terrible, and so unnecessary.”
“Unnecessary?”
“Yes. He was hardly an old man. Fifty-two. He should have had years and years of life ahead of — I’m sorry, I’ll be all right in a minute.”
A small white lace handkerchief had appeared in her hand, and tears in the corners of her eyes. She touched them away, shook her head slightly as though upset with herself for having thus given in to emotion, and took a strong swallow of her Scotch sour. “It’s such a terrible thing,” she said.
Engel was calculating. The husband had been fifty-two, and he by now doubted the wife could be more than twenty-seven or twenty-eight. It was the black clothing contrasting with the white skin that made her seem older at times. He said, “What was it, a heart attack?”
“No. An accident. One of those stupid... Well, there’s no point going over and over it, it’s happened and there’s an end to it.”
“You said,” Engel reminded her, “that I’d killed him. That’s how you sicked the cops on me.”
“I don’t know what came over me when I did that,” she said, and looked lost and bewildered. She touched the back of her hand to her brow.
Engel felt like saying he did know what had come over him when she said that, because what had come over him had been cops, but she was too easily distracted from her main line of thought, so he said nothing. He just waited, looking attentive.
“I had come to see Mr. Merriweather,” she said, as though recounting something sad that had happened long, long ago in the dim past, “to talk about the details of the funeral. Of course, my mind was full of thoughts about my husband, and how stupidly unnecessary his death had been — a kind of murder, in a way, murder by Fate, by Destiny, what you will — we never know what life has in store for us around the next cor—”
“Merriweather,” Engel suggested. “You’d come to see him about the funeral.”
“Yes. And then, seeing him there, lying there actually murdered, not by Fate but by some person, I suppose I just snapped for a minute.”
“You snapped,” said Engel. The way she kept skipping from style to style, from age to age, from mood to mood, he could believe she’d snapped for a lot longer than a minute.
“That must have been it,” she was saying. “You were there, and I got you all confused with Destiny, and poor Mr. Merriweather mixed up with my husband, and just everything all confused.”
“I’ll say.”
“I passed out — well, you know that — but when I came to I believe, I truly believe, I was no longer in my right mind. It seemed to me somehow it was my Murray who’d been murdered—” She passed a hand again across her brow, and said, “I can still remember just what I was thinking, and how sensible and natural and right it seemed at the time. Murray had been murdered, and in my mind’s eye I saw the face of his murderer, and it was you.”
“Just because I happened to be there,” said Engel.
“Yes. It was just another — accident.” A shadow crossed her face at the words, but then she shook her head and went on: “As soon as I regained consciousness, I tottered away to seek help, and when I saw you standing there by the door I... I said what I did.” Contrition shone in her face now, and embarrassment. “I’m sorry.”