“Of course not. But that insurance company’s name was. Minneapolis Mutual. People remember. Possibly we can work something out, a few letters of reference from some firm or other saying that you’d been employed by them. That kind of thing. Let me think about it.”
“You do that,” I said, and never brought it up again because I knew that there wasn’t any use.
Carmingler glanced at his watch. “Well, I suppose that’ll wrap it up for today.”
“Just one other thing,” I said.
“What?”
“I hope those eleven years that I put in were worth it.”
“Worth what?”
“Worth that million dollars you spent getting me out of jail.”
I thought or perhaps brooded about Carmingler and the past three months of my life as I stood there on the seventeenth floor of the Sir Francis Drake and watched the fog roll in. Even with the windows closed, I could hear the anachronistic clang of the cable cars as they ground their way up and down Powell. The streets were still visible, but the Bay Bridge had disappeared. In a few more minutes the fog would settle down for the evening and all I’d have left to admire would be the insurance company tower whose electric sign informed me that it was 64° outside and 3:59 P.M., both inside and out. I checked my new watch and found that the tower was right.
The brisk knock on my door came at precisely 4:02 P.M., according to the tower sign. I opened the door and he was younger than I’d expected. Much younger.
“Mr. Dye,” he said and smiled pleasantly enough. “I’m Victor Orcutt. May we come in?”
I opened the door wider and moved back. “Sure,” I said. “Come in. We can either have a party or a rubber of bridge.”
There were three of them. First came Victor Orcutt, then the man in the brown suit with the two-tone eyes, and last the honey blonde. She was still several years under thirty and her hair came as close to that shade of honey that bees make from yellow clover as nature or her beauty parlor could get it. She let a small smile play around her full mouth, but her mild brown eyes failed to back it up. They seemed sad, even hurt, but then I hadn’t even had a woman glance at me in a hundred days or so, and if I’d stared at her a little longer, I probably could have found anything that I was looking for, even my own private version of the land of Prester John.
Once in the room Orcutt spun around gracefully and waved a hand at the man in the brown suit. “I believe you’ve met my associate, Homer Necessary. I always delight in introducing him to people because of that wonderful surname. Don’t you think it’s wonderful, Mr. Dye?”
He didn’t give me a chance to say what I thought because he kept on talking. “And this is my executive assistant, Miss Carol Thackerty. Miss Thackerty, Mr. Dye.” I had nodded at Necessary and now I said how do you do or hello or how are you to Carol Thackerty who merely smiled and looked past me at something more interesting. The radiator perhaps.
Orcutt started to talk some more. “Well, I must say that you look awfully fit for having spent three months in what I understand to be a perfectly wretched prison.” He moved quickly to the window. Or flitted. “And this view should be simply glorious when the fog’s gone.” He spun around again and if it weren’t for his height, or rather lack of it, I would have been almost sure that at one time or other he’d spent a few years in the chorus line. He had the build, but not the height, not even with the elevator shoes. He stared at me for a moment and then smiled again. “I should confess, Mr. Dye, that I did expect you to be more — well — shall we say, emaciated?”
“We’ll say that,” I said and turned to Carol Thackerty. “Won’t you sit down?”
She managed that fleeting half-smile of hers again and gracefully lowered herself into a chair by the window with a murmured, “Thank you.” Her legs were fine, I noticed, long and well moulded. She wore a beige dress that was topped by a tweedy sort of cape-coat and she carried a tan leather bag that looked large enough to be a briefcase. It matched her shoes. She had a kind of finishing-school poise and she knew how to sit and wasn’t at all worried about what to do with her hands.
“Sit down, Homer,” Victor Orcutt said to the man in the brown suit. Necessary looked around and found a chair that he seemed to like and was about to sit in it when Orcutt snapped, “No, not that one. Use the couch over there.” Necessary’s expression didn’t change. He seemed not to have heard Orcutt; at least he didn’t respond or even look at him, but he did move to the couch.
“Let’s see now,” Orcutt said, surveying the room with his right forefinger pressed against his lower lip. “I think I will sit—” He looked around some more. “Over there. Yes!” Over there was the seat that Necessary had chosen first.
Even with the elevator shoes Victor Orcutt wasn’t much over five foot three and I can’t say that I ever saw him walk anyplace. He glided instead. He wore a dark blue suit which looked as if it might be velvet, but on closer inspection turned out to be cashmere. I had never seen a cashmere suit before. An odd jacket perhaps, or an overcoat, but never a suit, especially one that was buttoned up the front with twenty dollar gold pieces. Six of them. Underneath the suit was a Lord Byron shirt, probably silk, and a carefully knotted cravat as red as ox blood and twice as rich that only a boor would have called a necktie. For shoes he favored black alligator, blunt-toed loafers which boasted buckles that were probably real gold too. I assumed that his drawers were also silk, but I never found out.
He perched on the edge of the chair to make sure that his feet could touch the floor. I bet myself another bottle of Scotch that he wasn’t a day over twenty-six, if that. His poise reminded me of an actor’s whose ego will never allow him to be offstage. His hair was curly and blond and he wore it long, I suspected, because someone had once told him that it made him look like Byron. He had the same thin nose, sensual mouth, and strong, jutting chin which, for some reason, I decided was made out of glass. He smiled a lot, but it didn’t mean anything, and I had the feeling he would smile just like that if a dog got run over. He looked, all in all, a little prissy until you noticed his dark blue eyes which he may have borrowed from the local hangman, if there were one. They were eyes that rightfully belonged to a gunfighter or a pirate or perhaps an astronaut gone slightly mad. They were eyes that valued human life cheaply, including his own, and if he had any intelligence at all, he would be an enemy to respect. I doubted that you could ever count on him as a friend.
“I’m not Jewish,” he said in a completely ingenuous manner. “Are you?”
“No,” I said.
“Necessary isn’t either. And, of course, Miss Thackerty is just pure WASP. I do so wish you were Jewish. Even Italian would do.”
“Sorry,” I said. “By the way, I have Scotch, and water to mix it with. If you want anything else, I’ll have to call down for it.”
“Carol?” Orcutt said.
“Nothing, thank you,” she said.
“Homer?”
“Scotch is okay,” Necessary said. It was the first time he’d said anything since he arrived.
“I would like — let’s see now. Yes! I would like a Dr Pepper.”
“Dr Pepper,” I murmured and moved to the phone. I got room service and told them to send up a Dr Pepper, a bucket of ice, four glasses, and some Pall Mall cigarettes. Two packs. I thought that the cigarettes made the order a little more respectable. “Hold on,” I said into the phone and turned to the girl. “You sure you wouldn’t like something — tea perhaps?”
She smiled again — or almost did. “Why, yes, tea would be nice.”