The girl tried various offices and then said to him, "I'm sorry, Mr. Black. They say he hasn't come in yet, but he ought to be in soon. Do you want to wait?"
"Okay," he said, feeling glum. He threw himself down on a bench, lit a cigarette, and sat with his hands folded.
After fifteen minutes he heard voices along the hall. A door opened and the tall, lean, baggy-tweed figure of Stuart Lowery put in its appearance. "Oh, hello Mr. Black," he said in his reasonable fashion.
"Guess what was waiting for me in my office," Bill Black said. He handed Lowery the note. Lowery read it carefully.
"I'm surprised," Lowery said.
"Just a freak accident," Black said. "One chance in a billion. Somebody printed up a list of good restaurants and stuck it in his hat, and then he got into one of the supply trucks and rode on in, and while he was unloading stuff from the truck the list fell out of his hat." A notion struck him. "Unloading cabbages, for instance. And when Vic Nielson started to carry the cabbages into the storage locker, he saw the list and said to himself, Just what I need; a list of good restaurants. So he picked it up, carried it home, and pasted it on the wall by the phone."
Lowery smiled uncertainly.
"I wonder if anyone wrote down the numbers he called," Black said. "That might be important."
"Seems to me that one of us will have to go over to the house," Lowery said. "I wasn't planning to go again until the end of the week. You could go this evening."
"Do you suppose we could have been infiltrated by some traitor?"
"Successful approach," Lowery said.
"Yes," he said.
"Let's see if we can find out."
"I'll drop over tonight," Black said. "After dinner. I'll take over something to show Ragle and Vic. By then I can whip up some sort of thing." He started to leave and then he said, "How'd he do on his entries for yesterday?"
"Seemed to be all right."
"He's getting distraught again. The signs are all there. More empty beer cans on the back porch, a whole bagful of them. How can he guzzle beer and work at the same time? I've watched him at it for three years, and I don't understand it."
Dead-pan, Lowery said, "I'll bet that's the secret. It's not in Ragle; it's in the beer."
Nodding good-bye, Black left the _Gazette_ building.
On the drive back to the MUDO building, one thought kept returning to him. There was just that one possibility that he could not face. Everything else could be handled. Arrangements could be made. But--
Suppose Ragle was becoming sane again?
That evening, after he left the MUDO building, he stopped by a drugstore and searched for something to buy. At last his attention touched on a rack of ball-point pens. He tore several of the pens loose and started out of the store with them.
"Hey, mister!" the clerk said, with indignation.
"I'm sorry," Black said. "I forgot." That certainly was true; it had slipped his mind, for a moment, that he had to go through the motions. From his wallet he took some bills, accepted change, and then hurried out to his car.
It was his scheme to show up at the house with the pens, telling Vic and Ragle that they had been mailed to the waterworks as free samples but that city employees weren't allowed to accept them. You fellows want them? He practiced to himself as he drove home.
The best method was always the simple method.
Parking in the driveway he hopped up the steps to the porch and inside. Curled up on the couch, Junie was sewing a button on a blouse; she ceased working at once and looked up furtively, with such a flutter of guilt that he knew she had been out strolling with Ragle, holding hands and exchanging vows.
"Hi," he said.
"Hi," Junie said. "How'd it go at work today?"
"About the same."
"Guess what happened today."
"What happened today?"
Junie said, "I was down at the launderette picking up your clothes and I ran into Bernice Wilks, and we got to talking about school -- she and I went to Cortez High together -- and we drove downtown in her car and had lunch, and then we took in a show. And I just got back. So dinner is four frozen beef pies." She eyed him apprehensively.
"I love beef pies," he said.
She got up from the couch. In her long quilted skirt and sandals and wide-collared blouse with the medal-sized buttons she looked quite charming. Her hair had been put up artfully, a coil tied at the back in a classical knot. "You're real sterling," she said, with relief. "I thought you'd be mad and start yelling."
"How's Ragle?" he said.
"I didn't see Ragle today."
"Well," he said reasonably, "how was he last time you saw him?"
"I'm trying to remember when I last saw him."
"You saw him yesterday," he said.
She blinked. "No," she said.
"That's what you said last night."
Doubtfully, she said, "Are you sure?"
This was the part that annoyed him; not her slipping off into the hay with Ragle, but her making up sloppy tales that never hung together and which only served to create more confusion. Especially in view of the fact that he needed very badly to hear about Ragle's condition. The folly of living with a woman picked for her affability. She could be counted on to blunder about and do the right thing, but when it came time to ask her what had happened, her innate tendency to lie for her own protection slowed everything to a halt. What was needed was a woman who could commit an indiscretion and then talk about it. But too late to reshape it all, now.
"Tell me about old Ragle Gumm," he said.
Junie said, "I know you have your evil suspicions, but they only reflect projections of your own warped psyche. Freud showed how neurotic people do that all the time."
"Just tell me, will you," he said, "how Ragle is feeling these days. I don't care what you've been up to."
That did the trick.
"Look," Junie said, in a thin, deranged voice that carried throughout the house. "What do you want me to do, say I've been having an affair with Ragle, is that it? All day long I've been sitting here thinking; you know what about?"
"No," he said.
"I possibly might leave you, Bill. Ragle and I may go somewhere together."
"Just the two of you? Or along with the Little Green Man?"
"I suppose that's a slur on Ragle's earning capacity. You want to insinuate that he can't support both himself and I."
"The hell with it," Bill Black said, and went into the other room, by himself.
Instantly Junie materialized in front of him. "You really have contempt because I don't have your educational background," she said. Her face, stained with tears, seemed to blur and swell. She did not look so charming, now.
Before he could phrase an answer, the door chimes sounded.
"The door," he said.
Junie stared at him and then she turned and left the room. He heard her open the front door and then he heard her voice, brisk and only partially under control, and another woman's voice.
Curiosity made him tag along after her.
On the porch stood a large, timid-looking, middle-aged woman in a cloth coat. The woman carried a clipboard, a leather binder, and on her arm was an armband with an insigne. The woman droned on to Junie in a monotone, and at the same time she fumbled in the binder.
Junie turned her head. "Civil Defense," she said.
Seeing that she was too upset to talk, Black stepped up to the door and took her place. "What's this?" he said.
The timidity on the middle-aged woman's face increased; she cleared her throat and in a low voice said, "I'm sorry to bother you during the dinner hour, but I'm a neighbor of yours, I live down the street, and I'm conducting a door-to-door campaign for CD, Civil Defense. We're badly in need of daytime volunteers, and we wondered if there might be anyone at home at your house during the day who could volunteer an hour or so during the week of his or her time...."