He got a key and we took the elevator. The morning paper was still lying in front of her door. I didn’t like the looks of that, either. I waited, dreading what we might see, while he inserted the key and pushed the door open. He cocked his head as if he were listening for something. Then I heard it too. It was a typewriter. It sounded like a kid tearing past a picket fence with a stick.
“Friend,” he said, “take my advice and duck—”I paid no attention. I shoved past him and ran across the living room to the door of her study. It was thick with drifting layers of cigarette smoke, and she was sitting before the typewriter dressed in the Capri pants and not much of anything else except a white shirt that wasn’t even buttoned. The white hair was rumpled and her face looked tired, but her eyes were blazingly alive. There were sheets of paper all around her on the rug and in the wastebasket and on the stand on both sides of the typewriter.
“Suzy!” I said. “Thank God, you’re all right.”
She made an erasure and started banging the machine again. “What the hell do you want?” she asked, without even looking up.
I stared at her. “I’ve been worried sick about you.”
“Oh?” she said. She picked up one of the pages, read something she had written and studied it, frowning.
“Miss Patton,” the manager called uncertainly from the front door. “Do you know this man?”
She looked up then, for the first time. “Oh, it’s you.” She waved an arm at the manager. “Yes, I know him. But what the hell is this, the middle of US 1? Or Times Square on New Year’s Eve? You’d think on the seventh floor of an apartment building with the door locked—”
He left.
“You didn’t answer the phone,” I said. “Or the door.”
“Answer the phone?” She looked at me as if I’d gone completely crazy. “I never answer the stupid telephone when I’m working. I don’t even hear it. What do you want, anyway? I thought the radio news this morning said you’d been cleared of that murder charge.”
“I was,” I said. “But I wanted to see you again. And tell you that you were right about every bit of it.”
“All right, all right.” She tore the sheet from the machine and rolled in a new one. “Now you’ve told me.”
“And thank you.”
“Ummmmhh?” she said, and the stick-against-a-picket-fence started again.
She had forgotten I was there.
I picked up a blank sheet of her paper, sat down at the coffee table in the living room, and wrote out a short note.
”Dear Suzy:
This is for the hat and coat. Thanks a million for everything. And I hope the Southern girl who hides the injured Union soldier is just half as nice as you.
Irish.”
I took a hundred dollars from my wallet, dropped it on the note, weighted it with the ashtray, and went out. She didn’t even look up.
THE END