“What’ll ya have, mista?” She edged sideward behind the bar, of necessity. Her breasts, beneath a dainty pink-rosebud gingham, looked like distended cow udders.
He pretended deliberation. “Oh — Scotch on the rocks.”
She rested a forearm plump as a horse’s thigh on the bar. “Any special brand, mista?”
“I can’t tell the difference between one kind of Scotch and another, after it’s down.” He grinned disarmingly. “Where is everybody?”
“We don’t get much suppertime trade.” She poured liquor deftly. “Crowd generally begins drifting in along about seven. You stick around. Be plenty going on. Chaser?”
“Just creek water.” He noticed she didn’t put any cocktail napkin beside his glass. Nor did he see any pile of them on the hack-bar anywhere. Could she have overheard Carol’s phone call to him? “How’s about a hamburger?”
“Sure.” She made change. “How you want it?”
“I don’t want it straight across the board, if you know what I mean.”
She showed nice teeth in a small, decisive smile. “We don’t serve horseburgers here. You want onions?”
“No. I might see my girl later.”
“Lettuce and mayonnaise? Or mustard?”
“Mustard, please. Could I have it on toast?” That would take her a couple of minutes more, give him that much time to case the joint.
“Toast, coming up.” She crab-stepped out, into the kitchen.
He strolled toward the door marked “Kings.” His eyes searched the narrow booth tables, the floor beneath. No dropped handkerchief or glove. Not even a lipstick-reddened butt of the special brand of hollow-tipped cigarette Carol favored.
In the lavatory he listened for possible sounds from the adjoining cubicle. None.
He tried to think of some contingency which might have made her leave without waiting for him. If she’d spotted someone she’d thought it urgently important to follow, she might have gone on, intending to phone the house later. But she couldn’t have learned anything about Jack-the-Wrecker’s connection with the case, could she?
Perhaps she’d meant it when she’d told him she was getting tight. Tony’d never seen her that way, but if she’d been buying quickies in a score of bars, in the line of duty, she might be feeling the effects by now. Still, under those conditions she wouldn’t have been likely to have driven her car away.
He went back to the bar.
A young couple came in, slid into a booth with the familiarity of patrons well acquainted with Ravenwood.
The swinging door opened a foot. Fat lady hollered: “Be right with ya, kids.”
The youth, a greasy-haired sharpie in a coat with lapels reaching to his belt, waved airily: “Take your time, Maggie-O. We got all night.” He laughed boisterously, leering at his companion, a timid teen-ager. “Ain’t we, Annie Lou?”
In the back-bar mirror, Tony saw Annie Lou glance quickly in his direction, then away, as if ashamed. So Ravenwood Lodge was one of those hot-pillow motels that didn’t inquire too closely into the marital status of its overnight guests! It didn’t surprise Tony Quinn much, but still, that was small-time lawbreaking which didn’t quite seem to be in the same bracket as kidnaping and killing prominent hoodlums.
The blubbery behemoth served his hamburger. He had another Scotch on ice cubes, finished the sandwich. Then he drifted into the phone booth, closed the folding glass door.
On the shelf beneath the instrument was a paper napkin. He unfolded it.
Beneath a pattern of cocktail glasses with stems interlaced was the corny old couplet he’d quoted to Carol. He wondered how welcome he was, in this place!
As he slipped the folded square of paper into his coat pocket and dropped a nickel in the coin slot, his acutely sensitive ears caught a whispered:
“Sssssh! He’s in there, now!”
Instantly he realized that one side panel of the booth formed part of the flimsy partition separating kitchen from barroom.
He gave the operator the number of one of the typists in his deposition department, put his left ear against the thin wallboard panel.
Chapter VII
Short, clip-clop footsteps came through clearly — that would be the waddling woman. Then a man’s voice, faint and muffled as if the speaker was talking with a cigar in his mouth.
“Are you sure he’s the D.A.?”
The woman’s irritated whisper again. “I saw his picture on all those window posters before election, didn’t I?”
The typist said, “Hello?”
Quinn kept his voice low enough so he’d sound like a man conducting an intimate conversation. “Listen, sweets, I’m sorry I was such a heel about — well you know, last night—”
The girl at the other end of the line exclaimed, “Who is this? Who do you think you’re talking to, anyway?”
Quinn gave it the business. “I guess I must of had one too many, sweets, or I wouldn’t have done anything like — you know. But y’oughta understand, when a feller really thinks the world of you—”
She stammered, “Is this Mr. Quinn? You sound like Mr. Quinn.”
He went on, “Well, I certainly am relieved to hear you say so, sweets. Yeah, yeah — sure. I’ll be around for you in two shakes. — Oh, I’m out at a place called Ravens Roost or something. See you in no time. By, now.”
He hung up, wondering what in the hell that poor kid would make of his dizzy conversation. But at least he hadn’t said anything to confirm the suspicions of the two behind that sounding-board partition.
He wanted to stay in the booth to hear the sotto voce comments which would follow his ringing off, but that might have been a giveaway. It was difficult to make himself stroll out, finish his drink and depart, too, when every instinct urged him to bust through that swinging door and confront the owner of that muffled voice.
But there was Carol to think about first. First and last. Even before his sworn duty. Because the undeniable truth was that nothing, nobody, in Vulcan City or anywhere else mattered half so much to him as she did.
He got in his car, turned, headed back toward town. Half a mile in, he swung off the highway to another roadside juke joint:
There were three or four people in the cafe. The purple-red-green-lighted contraption was giving out with The Wheel of Fortune, and that suited him fine. No one would be likely to overhear what he had to say in this phone booth.
He dialed his office.
“Silk?”
“Yes, sir. Where are you, sir? Carol left a message at your home—”
“I got it, Silk. Now, listen—”
“Excuse me, sir. She phoned in a second time.”
“Oh! When?”
“About five minutes after her first call, Butch said. You’d barely left to drive to Ravenwood Lodge.”
“What’d she say?”
“I didn’t like the sound of it, sir.”
“Give!”
“Well, sir, as Butch reported it, she said she was sorry to have missed you, but she’d got off on the wrong foot entirely and was going directly to the Thirty-eight Club to follow up the right lead. She’d be looking for you there, as soon as you could get there.”
“The Thirty-eight Club.”
“Yes, sir. I know. There isn’t any such place in town.”
“I’m not so sure.” Tony’s face hardened into sternness. Thirty-eight was the Vulcan City police radio car signal for a homicide alarm. “There may be, at that. You drop everything else, Silk, and zoom on out here, on the double. And say—”
“Yes, sir?”
“Don’t forget those lead knuckles.”