She shot him a look that was only meant for the two of them, but there were three of them there that understood it.
“What’re we gonna do, leave her behind us here?” he snarled.
The Bristol woman raked distracted fingers through her hair. “Look at the mess I got us into now,” she bleated querulously. “What the hell did y’have to—”
“Shut up,” the man answered flintily.
“She knows already. What d’you suppose brought her down here?”
“Then why the hell didn’t you handle it right in the first place, like you were supposed to?”
“I couldn’t manage him, he got out of hand. I only went down to the door and let you in thinking you could throw a scare into him, get him to come across. That didn’t mean you had to sign off on him!”
“What’d you expect me to do, when he made a grab at it like he did, let him take it away from me? You saw what happened. I had to cork him up in self-defense. Anyway, what’s the good of talking about it now? You loused it up and the damage is done. It’s this twist we’ve got to think about now. I still think the smart thing would be to—”
“No, I’m telling you, Griff; no! That would be the dumb thing to do, not the smart thing. Let her chirp after we’re gone. It’s still only her word against ours. She went up there too, didn’t she? She coulda done it just as well as us. Just let’s get out of here—”
He flung open a closet-door on the other side of the room, looked in. “How about this? Let’s stuff her in here, ditch the key. It backs up against a dead wall, so she’ll never be heard. That ought to be good for plenty of head-start. It’ll be days before they get around to busting this door open—”
They lugged her across to it between them, her legs trailing after her. They thrust her inside like some sort of a mothproof garment-bag.
“Better hitch her to something,” he said, “otherwise she might try thumping against the door with her whole chassis.” He rigged up a sort of halter-arrangement of sheeting-strips, passed it under her arms, wound it around one of the clothes-hooks behind her. She was left upright, with her feet to the floor, but unable to shift out from the rear wall of the closet.
The woman said: “Can she breathe in here, in case they take some time to—?”
“I don’t know,” he answered callously. “She should find that out and tell us about it afterwards.”
They closed the door on her. A sudden pall of darkness obliterated everything. The key was withdrawn, the key that they were going to throw away somewhere outside. She could still hear them through the door, for a brief moment or two longer, making their last-minute preparations for departure.
“Got the bag?”
“What about that stew down at the desk? He must’ve seen her come up here.”
“I can handle that easy. Where’s that pint of rye I bought this afternoon? I’ll offer him a goodbye-slug across the desk. He always goes around behind the letterboxes to down a shot. You duck out while he’s back there, and make like she’s with you, talk to yourself or something.”
“What about the jig on the elevator?”
“We’ll take the stairs. We’ve done that plenty of times before when we got tired waiting for him to come up, didn’t we? The pushbutton don’t work, that’s all; he didn’t hear us ringing it. Come on, you ready?”
“Hey, I’m missing that hotel-bill. We’ve got to settle up before we can get out of here. It must have fallen on the floor somewhere around the room here—”
“Never mind looking for it now; let it go. He can make out a new one for me down at the desk—”
The outer door closed and they were gone.
Chapter 12
Going over to the third and final place in a cab, Quinn thought he understood what was behind all this complicated maneuvering. Holmes didn’t want to walk into a trap. Therefore, to avoid one, he’d first of all moved Quinn out of the place he’d originally been in to a second place. He’d scrutinized him there unseen. But there still being no absolute surety that Quinn was alone, even though he seemed to be, he’d shifted the rendezvous to still a third place. This gave him the opportunity of being the first one on the grounds, and thereby being sure that the surroundings were sterile. To plant accomplices Quinn would have had to do it in full sight of the prospective prey.
He made it in about seven or eight minutes, no more. This Owen’s had a good deal of the look of one of the old-time speak-easies of two decades before. It was the ground-floor of a brownstone house, and you went in by the basement. It had a neon sign to blazon it, but it was past the legal closing time by now, and that was out. Most of the people were out of it too. But he jumped down and went in anyway.
There was a man sitting there in a booth by himself, facing the front. His hair was frosting around the edges, but still dark on the crown of his head. He had on rimless spectacles, and they gave him rather a sedate look. Much too sedate to be sitting by himself at a bistro around five in the morning. He looked more the type to be at home nodding over a paper under a lamp, and with the deadline set for eleven. He had on a light-gray suit, and a light-gray hat hung from a wall-hook over his table. His hand was curved around a highball, and a second one, ownerless, stood on the opposite side of the table.
As Quinn came in he unobtrusively pointed one finger upward, then dropped his hand back to the table again.
Quinn went over and stood looking down at him. He sat looking up.
There was a curious moment of abeyance, of staring without speech, rendered grotesque by their nearness to one another.
The man at the table spoke first.
“You’re Quinn, I guess.”
“I’m Quinn, and you’re Holmes.”
“How much is your taxi bill?”
“Sixty cents.”
“Here’s the money.” He let the coins flow out of a hole at the end of his hand, as thought the change were something fluid.
Quinn came back in again in a moment. He hadn’t moved, still sat there like that. Quinn stopped again where he’d been before, by the edge of the table.
Holmes gestured sketchily toward the plank-seat across from him. “Sit down.”
Quinn sat tentatively, considerably to the outside of it, away from the wall.
Again they looked at one another, the young fellow in his early twenties, the man in his late forties or perhaps even fifties. Holmes was older, more experienced. It showed itself almost at once. He was more in command of the situation; even this situation, which should have been to his disadvantage. Not even virtue, being on the right side, can make up for lack of experience.
“There’s a drink for you,” he said. “I had to order ahead, so I’d be allowed to stay in here. It’s past closing time.”
Quinn thought, but without putting much stock into it: Be funny if he’d slipped something into this. That was 1910 stuff, though. He didn’t take it seriously.
Holmes almost seemed to have read his thoughts. “Take mine instead, then,” he said. “I haven’t put it to my mouth yet.” He drew the other glass away from in front of Quinn, tilted it to his lips, drank deeply.
“Whenever you say,” he said ironically.
Quinn looked around him surreptitiously, thinking: This is no place to browbeat it out of him. I can’t do much with him here. I shouldn’t have let him pick the background.
Again Holmes seemed to read his mind. “Do you want to come out to the car instead?”
“I didn’t know you had one. Why didn’t you pick me up with it in the first place, instead of letting me do all this chasing back and forth?”
“I wanted to get a line on you first. I didn’t know what I was up against.”
You still don’t, thought Quinn bitterly.