Bliss was eying the far side of the foyer ceiling as the description unfolded. “No,” he kept saying, “no,” as if going over the records to himself. “The closest I can come to it is Helen Raymond, but—”
“No, I, ’member Miss Raymond,” Charlie said firmly. “It wasn’t her; I got a cab for her many a time.” Then he said, “Anyway, y’know how I’m pretty sure you don’t know her? Because she didn’t know you herself.”
“What?” said Bliss, “Then what the hell did she want coming around asking for me, trying to get into my place?”
Charlie was still a lap behind him in the circles they seemed to be making. “She didn’t know you worth a damn,” he repeated with heavy emphasis. “I tried her out, on the way up—”
“Oh, so then you were going to let her up. That must have been a hundred, after all.”
Charlie cleared his throat deprecatingly, realizing he had made a faux pas. “No, Mr. Bliss, no,” he protested soulfully. “Now, you know me better than that; I wasn’t. But I did start up on the car with her, acting like I was going to. I thought maybe that’d be the quickest way of getting rid of her, pretend like I was going to and then at the last minute—”
“Yeah, I know,” said Bliss dryly.
“Well, we started up in the car together, to the fourth. And on the way I remembered that robbery we had here in the building last year, y’know, and I figured I better not take any chances. So I started to reel her out a fake description of you, just the opposite of your real one, to try her out. I said, ‘He’s red-headed, ain’t he, and pretty tall, just a little bit under six feet? I’m kind of new on the job here. I wanna make sure I got him placed right, there are so many tenants in the building.’ She fell for it like a ton of bricks. ‘Yes, of course,’ she said, ‘that’s him.’ Kind of quickly, to keep me from catching on that was the first time she heard what you looked like herself.”
“Well, I’ll be a—” Bliss said. He went ahead and said what it was he would be.
“So, of course, that was enough for me,” Charlie assured him virtuously. “That finished it. When I heard that I said to myself, ‘Nothing doing. Not on my shift, y’don’t!’ But I didn’t say anything to her, because — well, she was dressed pretty swell and all that, not the kind it pays to get tough with. So I let her down easy, tried the wrong key to your door and when it wouldn’t work pretended I didn’t have no other and couldn’t let her in. We went downstairs again, and she just kind of shrugged it off, like if she hadn’t gotten in that time, it didn’t matter because she was going to sooner or later. She smiled and said, ‘Some other time, then,’ and started off down the street, just the way she came walking. It was funny, too, dressed up the way she was. I watched her as far as the corner, and I didn’t see her call no cab or nothing, just walked along like it was ten in the morning. Then she turned the comer and disappeared. O’Connor, the cop, he passed her coming up this way, and I even seen him turn and look after her. She sure was a looker.”
“Just a ship that passes in the night,” remarked Bliss. “Well, one sure thing, it was some kind of stall. If I didn’t know her — and I don’t, from your description — and she didn’t know me, what was it all about? What the hell was she after? Maybe she had me mixed up with somebody else.”
“No, she had your name right, even your first name. ‘Mr. Ken Bliss,’ she asked for when she first come in.”
“And she didn’t drive up, either, you say?”
“No, just came walking along from nowhere, then went walking away again just like she came. Funniest thing I ever seen.”
They talked it over a few moments longer, man to man, with the typical freemasonry of two-thirty in the morning. “Aw, you run into a lot of funny things like that from time to time, livin’ in a big city like this. You’re bound to. I know, Mr. Bliss, I seen enough of them myself, in my line of work. Nuts that think they know you, and nuts that think they love you, and nuts that think you done something to them. You’d be surprised what bugs and mental cases there are walking around loose—”
“So now maybe I’ve got one of ’em fastened on me. That’s a cheerful thought to take up to bed,” Bliss grimaced.
He turned away, readied the elevator panel. He flashed Charlie a mock-apprehensive backward grin just before it closed on him. “It’s getting so a young guy ain’t safe any more living by himself. I think I’ll get myself married off and get hold of some protection!”
But the thought that he took up with him was of Marjorie — not of anyone else.
Corey showed up at his door at eight-thirty, long before he’d even begun to get ready, the night of Marjorie’s engagement party. “What the hell,” Bliss said with the pretended disgruntlement one shows only a close friend, “I only just got back from eating; I haven’t even shaved yet.”
“I called y’at the office at four-thirty. Where the hell were you?” Corey barked back at him with equally familiar brusqueness.
He came in and appropriated the best chair, swung one leg up over its arm. He got rid of his hat by aiming it at the windowsill. It missed but stayed on a low book rack underneath.
Corey wasn’t a bad-looking sort of fellow, without being decorative about it. Taller than Bliss, a little leaner — or maybe just seeming so because he was taller — and with dark brown hair and heavy brows. He tried to be man-about-townish in an Esquire sort of way, but it was just a veneer; you could tell he was a primitive underneath that. Every once in a while a crack would show, and you’d get a startling glimpse of jungle through it. Veneer or not, he worked hard at it. Any party you ever went to he was there, holding up a door frame, hand-warming a glass. Any girl you ever mentioned him to, she knew him, too — or had a friend who did. His technique was a head-on attack, a Blitzkrieg, and it had succeeded in the unlikeliest quarters. Some of the haughtiest, most unbending shoulders in town had been pinned to the mat, if the truth had only been known.
He started rubbing his hands with a fine show of malicious glee. “Well, tonight you get hooked! Tonight you get branded! Feel like running out yet? You bet you do! You’re all white around the gills—”
“Think I’m like you?”
Corey trip-hammered a thumb against his own chest. “You should be like me. This is one guy they don’t pin down to a formal promise!”
“If you’d bathed oftener, maybe you’d get more offers,” Bliss grunted disparagingly.
“And make them have a hard time finding me when the lights go out? That wouldn’t be fair. So where were you this afternoon? I wanted to eat with you.”
“I was out getting the headlight. Where d’you suppose—” He opened a dresser drawer, took out a little cubed box, snapped the lid. “What d’you think of it?”
Corey took it out of the plush, breathed on it admiringly. “Say, is that a rock!”
“It ought to be. It threw me pul-lenty.” Bliss pitched it back in the drawer with an air of indifference that was admirably assumed, started unhitching his suspenders. “I’m going in and take a shower. You know where the Scotch is.”
He came in again in something under twenty minutes, complete down to bat-wing tie. “Who was the dame?” Corey asked idly, looking up from a newspaper.
“What dame?”
“The phone rang just now while you were in there, and some girl asked for you. I could tell it wasn’t one of your old pals by the way she spoke. ‘Does Mr. Kenneth Bliss live there?’ I told her you were busy and asked if there was anything I could do. Not another word, just hung up.”