“Lots of questions I’ve still got to ask you, Ollie. We shouldn’t take time to talk much now, but when will we have a chance to?”
“Tomorrow. I’ll say I have to go downtown, make up some reasons. And you’ve got your excuse already—the business you came to do. Maybe you can get it over with sooner than you thought—but then decide, since you’ve come this far anyway, to stay out the week. That way you can stick around here as much as you want, or go out only when I go out.”
“Fine. We’ll talk that out tomorrow. But about tonight, we’ll be talking, the three of us, and what can I safely talk about? Does she know anything about the size of my business, or can I improvise freely and talk about it?”
“Improvise your head off. I’ve never talked about your business. Don’t know much about it myself.”
“Good. Another question. How come, at only twenty-five, I’ve got a business of my own? Most people are still working for somebody else at that age.”
“You inherited it from your stepfather, Cartwright. He died three years ago. You were working in the shop and moved to the office and took over. And as far as I know, or Eve, you’re doing okay with it.”
“Good. And I’m not married?”
“No, but if you want to invent a girl you’re thinking about marrying, that’s another safe thing you can improvise about.”
I put the last of the contents of my suitcase in the dresser drawer and we went back to the living room. Eve had the cocktails made and was waiting for us. We sat around sipping at them, and this time I was able to do most of the talking instead of having to let Ollie filibuster so I wouldn’t put my foot into my mouth by saying something wrong.
Ollie suggested a second round but Eve stood up and said that she was tired and that if we’d excuse her, she’d retire. And she gave Ollie a wifely caution about not having more than one more drink. He promised he wouldn’t and made a second round for himself and me.
He yawned when he put his down after the first sip. “Guess this will be the last one, Ed. I’m tired, too. And we’ll have plenty of time to talk tomorrow.”
I wasn’t tired, but if he was, that was all right by me. We finished our nightcaps fairly quickly.
“My room’s the one next to yours,” he told me as he took our glasses back to the bar. “No connecting door, but if you want anything, rap on the wall and I’ll hear you. I’m a light sleeper.”
“So am I,” I told him. “So make it vice versa on the rapping. I’m the one that’s supposed to be protecting you, not the other way around.”
“And Eve’s room is the one on the other side of mine. No connecting door there, either. Not that I’d use it, at this stage, even if it stood wide open with a red carpet running through it.”
“She’s still a beautiful woman,” I said, just to see how he’d answer it.
“Yes. But I guess I’m by nature monogamous. And this may sound corny and be corny, but I consider Dorothy and me married in the sight of God. She’s all I’ll ever want, she and the boy. Well, come on, and we’ll turn in.”
I turned in, but I didn’t go right to sleep. I lay awake thinking, sorting out my preliminary impressions. Eve Bookman—yes, I believed Ollie’s story about their marriage and didn’t even think it was exaggerated. Most people would think her sexy as hell to look at her, but I’ve got a sort of radar when it comes to sexiness. It hadn’t registered with a single blip on the screen. And Koslovsky is a much better than average judge of people and what had he said about her? Oh, yes, he’d called her a cold potato.
Some women just naturally hate sex and men—and some of those very women become things like strip teasers because it gives them pleasure to arouse and frustrate men. If one of them breaks down and has an affair with a man, it’s because the man has money, as Ollie had, and she thinks she can hook him for a husband, as Eve did Ollie. And once she’s got him safely hog-tied, he’s on his own and she can be her sweet, frigid self again. True, she’s given up the privilege of frustrating men in audience-size groups, but she can torture the hell out of one man, as long as he keeps wanting her, and achieve respectability and even social position while she’s doing it.
Oh, she’d been very pleasant to me, very hospitable, and no doubt was pleasant to all of Ollie’s friends. And most of them, the ones without radar, probably thought she was a ball of fire in bed and that Ollie was a very lucky guy.
But murder—I was going to take some more convincing on that. It could be Ollie’s imagination entirely. The only physical fact he’d come up with to indicate even the possibility of it was the business of the missing will. And she could have taken and destroyed that but still have no intention of killing him before he could make another like it; she could simply be hoping he’d never discover that it was missing.
But I could be wrong, very wrong. I’d met Eve less than three hours ago and Ollie had lived with her eight years. Maybe there was more than met the eye. Well, I’d keep my eyes open and give Ollie a run for his five hundred bucks by not assuming that he was making a murder out of a molehill. I went to sleep and Ollie didn’t tap on my wall.
I WOKE at seven but decided that would be too early and that I didn’t want to make a nuisance of myself by being up and around before anybody else, so I went back to sleep and it was half past nine when I woke the second time. I got up, showered and shaved—my bedroom had a private bath so all of them must have—dressed and went exploring. I went back to the living room and through it, and found a dining room. The table was set for breakfast for three but no one was there yet.
A matronly-looking woman who’d be a cook or housekeeper—I later learned that she was both and her name was Mrs. Ledbetter—appeared in the doorway that led through a pantry to the kitchen and smiled at me. “You must be Mr. Bookman’s brother,” she said. “What would you like for breakfast?”
“What time do the Bookmans come down for breakfast?” I asked.
“Usually earlier than this. But I guess you talked late last night. They should be up soon, though.”
“Then I won’t eat alone, thanks. I’ll wait till at least one of them shows up. And as for what I want—anything; whatever they will be having. I’m not fussy about breakfasts.”
She smiled and disappeared into the kitchen and I disappeared into the living room. I took a chair with a magazine rack beside it and was leafing through the latest Reader’s Digest, just reading the short items in it, when Ollie came in looking rested and cheerful. “Morning, Ed. Had breakfast?”
I told him I’d been up only a few minutes and had decided to wait for company. “Come on, then,” he said. “We won’t wait for Eve. She might be dressing now, but then again she might sleep till noon.”
But she didn’t sleep till noon; she came in when we were starting our coffee, and told Mrs. Ledbetter that she’d just have coffee, as she had a lunch engagement in only two hours. So the three of us sat drinking coffee and it was very cozy and you wouldn’t have guessed there was a thing wrong. You wouldn’t have guessed it, but you might have felt it. Anyway, I felt it.
Ollie asked me if I wanted a lift downtown to do the business I’d come to do, and of course I said that I did. We discussed plans. Mrs. Ledbetter, I learned, had the afternoon and evening off, starting at noon, so no dinner would be served that evening. Eve would be gone all afternoon, playing bridge after her lunch date, and she suggested we all meet in the Loop and have dinner there. I wasn’t supposed to know Chicago, of course, so I let them pick the place and it came up the Pump Room at seven.
Ollie and I left and on the way to the garage back of the building, I asked him if he minded if I drove the Buick. I said I liked driving and didn’t get much chance to.