So I jerked the typewriter over to the desk and rewrote the paragraphs. I used a straightedge to tear the printed story from the page and pasted it up on two sheets of Copy paper. I crossed out the two offending paragraphs and marked them for a sub. I went through the story again and caught a couple of typos and fixed up another place or two to make the language better.
It was a wonder, I told myself, that I’d got the story down at all with the copydesk leaning back and hollering that it was way past deadline and Gavin there beside me, jigging from one foot to the other and panting out each line.
I took the inserts and the marked-up copy over to the city desk and dropped them in the basket. Then I went back to my desk again and picked up the mangled paper. I read Joy’s story, and it was a lulu. Then I looked for the story Dow had gone out to the airport to get and it wasn’t in the paper. I looked around again and Dow wasn’t anywhere in sight.
I dropped the paper on the desk top and sat there, doing nothing, idly remembering what had happened in Franklin’s conference room that morning. But all I could remember was the fly crawling on the skull.
Then, suddenly, there was something else.
Gunderson had asked me if there had been anything about Bennett that might be a clue to his identity and I had said there wasn’t.
But I had told him wrong. For there had been something. Not a clue exactly, but something damned peculiar. I remembered now—it was the smell of him. Shaving lotion, I had thought when I first got a whiff of it. But not any kind of lotion I had ever smelled before. Not the kind of lotion any other man would ever tolerate. Not that it was loud or strong—for there had been no more than that correct, faint suggestion of it. But it had been the kind of odor one does not associate with a human being.
I sat there and tried to classify it, tried to think of something with which I might compare it. But I couldn’t, because, for the life of me, I couldn’t remember exactly what it had smelled like. But I was mortally certain I would recognize it if I ever came in contact with it again.
I got up and walked over to Joy’s desk. She stopped typing as I came up to her. She lifted her head to look at me, and her eyes were bright and shiny, as if she had been trying to keep herself from crying.
“What’s the matter here?” I asked.
“Parker,” she said. “Those poor people! It’s enough to break one’s heart.”
“What poor—” I started to say, and then I had a hunch what had happened to her.
“How did you get hold of that one?” I demanded.
“Dow wasn’t here,” she said. “They came in asking for him. And everyone else was busy. So Gavin brought them over.”
“I was going to do it,” I told her. “Dow told me about it and I said I would. Then this Franklin’s thing came up and I forgot everything about it. There was supposed to be just a man. You said them . .
“He brought his wife and children and they sat down and looked at me with those big, solemn eyes of theirs. They told me how they had sold their home because it wasn’t big enough for a growing family and now they can’t find another one. They have to be out of their house in another day or two and they have nowhere at all to go. They sit there and tell their troubles to you and they look so hopeful at you. As if you were Santa Claus or the Good Fairy or something of the sort. As if your pencil were a wand. As if they were confident you can solve their problems and make everything all right. People have such funny ideas about newspapers, Parker. They think we practice magic. They think if they can get their stories into print, something good will happen. They think that we are people who can make miracles. And you sit there and look back at them, and you know you can’t.”
“I know,” I told her. “Just don’t let it get you. You mustn’t be a bleeder. You’ve got to harden up.”
“Parker,” she said, “get out of here and let me finish this. Gavin has been yelling for it for the last ten minutes.”
She wasn’t kidding me a second. She wanted me out of there so she could burst out crying quietly.
“OK,” I said. “Be seeing you tonight.”
Back at my desk, I put away the columns I had written earlier in the morning. ThenI got my hat and coat and went out to have a drink.
Ed was alone in his place, standing behind the bar with his elbows on it and his hands holding up his face. He didn’t look so good.
I got up on a stool and laid five dollars down.
“Give me a quick one, Ed,” I said. “I really need it bad.”
“Keep your money in your pocket,” he told me gruffly. “The drinks are all on me.”
I almost fell off the stool. He’d never done a thing like that before.
“You out of your mind?” I asked him. “Not that at all,” said Ed, reaching for my brand of Scotch. “I’m going out of business. I’m setting them up for my old, loyal customers whenever they come in.”
“Made your pile,” I said carelessly, for the guy is always joking, anything at all just to get a yak.
“I’ve lost my lease,” he told me.
I sympathized with him. “Well, that’s too bad,” I said. “But there must be a dozen places you can get, right here in the neighborhood.”
Ed shook his head dolefully. “I’m closed up,” he said. “I have no place to go. I’ve checked everywhere. If you want to know what I think, Parker, it’s dirty pool down at the city hail. Someone wants my license. Someone slipped a couple of aldermen a little extra dough.”
He poured the drink and shoved it over to me.
He poured one for himself, and that is something that no bartender ever does. It wasn’t hard to see that Ed just didn’t give a damn.
“Twenty-eight years,” he told me mournfully. “That’s how long I’ve been here. I always run a respectable joint. You know, Parker, that I did. You’ve been a regular customer. You’ve seen how I run the place. You never saw no rowdy stuff and you never saw no women. And you seen the cops in here, plenty of times, lined up and drinking on the house.”
I agreed with him. Everything he’d said was the gospel truth. “I know that, Ed,” I said. “Christ, I don’t see how that gang of ours will get the paper out if you have to close. The boys won’t have a place to go to get the taste out of their mouths. There isn’t another bar within eight blocks of the office.”
“I don’t know what I’ll do,” he said. “I’m too young to quit and I haven’t got the money. I have to earn a living. I could work for someone else, of course. Almost anyone in town would find a place for me. But I’ve always owned my own joint and it would take some getting used to. I don’t mind telling you it would come a little hard.”
“It’s a stinking shame,” I said.
“Me and Franklin’s,” he said. “We’ll go out together. I just read it in the paper. The story that you wrote. The town won’t be the same without Franklin’s.”
I told him the town wouldn’t be the same without him, either, and he poured me another drink, but this time he didn’t take one for himself.
He stood there and I sat there and we talked it over about Franklin’s closing and the lease he’d lost and neither of us knowing what the goddamn world might be coming to. He set up a couple more and had another one himself and we had some more after that and I made him let me pay for them. I told him even if he was going out of business he couldn’t just give away his liquor and he said he’d made enough off me in the last six or seven years that he could afford an afternoon of some free ones.
Some customers came in and Ed went to take care of them. Since they were strangers, or maybe just poor customers, he let them pay him for their drinks. He rang up the tab on the register and gave them their change and then came back to me. So we talked the situation over once again, repeating ourselves a good deal without noticing or caring.
It was two o’clock before I got out of there.