Gloomy persons like gloomy weather. They like foggy days and rain and sleet. They can understand those and cope with them. But it’s on those shiny, bird-singing days that they order up the two-fifths of vodka and take the sleeping pills down from the medicine cabinet, or crawl out on the ledge of the building, or go out to the garage with a length of hose and tape it to the exhaust. I went over to the window and stared down at the girls in their sunglasses and short summer dresses and wished it would rain. I waited five minutes for a bolt of lightning or a thunderclap or at least for a cloud to hide the sun, but when nothing happened I went over to the phone and called Carol Thackerty.
“I’ll buy you a drink,” I said when she answered.
“I thought you had company.”
“He’s gone.”
“You’re supposed to see Orcutt.”
“Not for lunch, I hope.”
“No. He’s having that with Phetwick the third and Doctor Warner Colfax.”
“Of the Colfax clinic?”
“The same. You’re supposed to give them a report after lunch.”
“When will that be?”
“A couple of hours.”
“Fine. I’ll buy you a drink and lunch.”
“Where?”
“My room.”
“Shall I bring Homer, and don’t say it’s not necessary.”
“Don’t anyway.”
“Just a cozy tête-à-tête with perhaps a nooner thrown in, right?”
“That did occur to me,” I said.
“Me too.”
“Fifteen minutes?”
“Make it twenty,” she said, “and order my lunch.”
“What?”
“Steak tartare with lots of capers.”
“And a raw egg?”
“Two,” she said.
“Chopped onions?”
“Gobs.”
“Well, there’s one thing about steak tartare,” I said.
“What?”
“If we’re busy doing something else, we won’t have to worry about it getting cold.”
After the drinks, and the wine, and the raw chopped steak, and a most satisfactory midday journey down some heretofore unexplored avenues in sexland, Carol Thackerty and I sat drinking coffee and waiting for my command appearance in the Rickenbacker suite before the crowned heads of Swankerton.
“It’s not really your dish, is it?” she said.
“What, sex?”
“No.”
“Well, what?”
“This whole Swankerton bamboozle.”
“That’s a good word.”
“It describes it.”
“Probably,” I said.
“But you don’t fit in, do you?”
“I haven’t thought about it.”
“You’re a good liar, but not that good.”
“All right, I thought about it. For five minutes just before I called you.
“And what did you decide?”
“Why the hell do I have to decide something? I just thought about it.”
“If somebody were setting me up, I’d think about it. Hard.”
“I read the enlistment papers carefully,” I said.
“You signed on to be tough, huh?”
“Something like that.”
“Why?”
“My thinking hasn’t got that far yet,” I said. “That’s tomorrow’s episode.”
She ground her cigarette out in an ashtray and kept on grinding it even after it was dead. “You’re in for a long fall,” she said. “I don’t think you know how far.”
“I’ve got a fair idea.”
“If I had to fall that far, I’d be looking for something to catch me.”
“Maybe I’ll just bounce.”
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “You won’t bounce. You’ll just shatter into a million, billion, trillion pieces.”
“That’s a lot of pieces.”
“I used to say that when I was a kid.”
“Why all the sudden concern?” I said.
She looked at me steadily. “Jesus, you ask some dumb questions sometimes.”
“Yes,” I said, “I suppose I probably do.”
Chapter 28
Channing d’Arcy Phetwick III crossed one bony leg over the other, cleared his throat, and in his old man’s faltering tenor said, “What precisely was the reaction of the Lynch person?”
I turned from the window which had a view of the Gulf and said, “He thought Mrs. Sobour was a financial whiz.”
Phetwick must have been close to eighty. He occupied one of the three chairs that were drawn up around a coffee table in the Rickenbacker suite. Orcutt and Doctor Colfax sat in the other two, Orcutt on the edge of his so that his feet could touch the floor. Phetwick’s voice kept cracking when he spoke, going from tenor to soprano, but each word came out all by itself, freshly minted, and the phrasing of each word was exactly the same. It was a curious way of speaking, something like a talking robot whose voice box needed oiling. Phetwick wore a hearing aid and thick bifocals and the backs of his hands were covered with brown liver spots. He had on a dark suit, almost black, that may have been broadcloth if they still make it, and a high collar, like the one that Herbert Hoover wears in all the history books. His stringy neck was too small for the collar and his flesh hung in gray, flabby folds, as if he had lost a lot of weight.
“Does Lynch believe that I will publish the story?” he said.
“Yes, I think so. He’s going to turn the stuff over to you today.”
“Excellent. I wrote my signed editorial this morning. It is, I think you will agree when you read it, exceptionally forceful.” Phetwick never seemed to use contractions when he spoke. “Now let us get on with the affair of the druggist.”
“Doctor Colfax has gone over the information concerning Frank Mouton,” Orcutt said. “It appears incontrovertible to him as well as to me and I suggest that Mr. Dye transmit it to Lynch much in the same manner that he transmitted the material on the Sobour woman.”
“Mouton is a deacon in my church,” Phetwick said to no one in particular. “Pity, I suppose.”
Dr. Warner Colfax stirred in his chair at Orcutt’s left. He was my idea of what a doctor should look like: his expensive tweed suit was carelessly rumpled, his tie was the wrong shade, and his shirt, while clean enough, was a little too tight at the neck and snug at the belly. His shoes, also expensive, were thoughtlessly cared for, and his blue eyes twinkled merrily behind practical, steel-rimmed glasses. He had a brush mustache, clipped fairly well, but gone to salt and pepper, and a wide sensitive mouth over a strong chin, with gray thinning hair that he brushed just so to cover a bare patch and to reveal that he, too, had a reassuring streak of harmless vanity. Good, gray Dr. Colfax.
“I don’t mind if the cocksucker slipped pills to every neurotic old cunt in town,” the good gray doctor said in a voice as gritty as ground glass. “But when he started wholesaling to those shitheads, I had a little talk with him.”
“To cut yourself in for ten percent, I believe,” Phetwick said.
The doctor twinkled his eyes some more. Only his voice kept him from being the lovable rogue. “Prove it,” he said with a warm smile and a weasel’s snarl.
The old man turned his head to look at the doctor. He turned it slowly and carefully and I almost expected to hear it squeak. “That may not be as difficult as you believe, Warner, should the occasion arise; I am certain that if your participation in the druggist’s illegal activities could not be proved, several of your other nefarious adventures would be unable to bear close public scrutiny.” Phetwick talked like that — commas, semicolons, and all.
“Don’t bang skeletons with me, Channing,” the doctor said. “I know where they’re all hidden — even yours.”