“During. He’s not on stage all the time. Ed, would you like a ducket or two for the show, Thursday evening? Or any night through Sunday, for that matter; we run four days.”
I told him I’d manage to make it one of the four but would just as soon kick through with a paid admission to help the cause.
Then he asked me about me, and about being a private detective, and I got to talking. And was still going strong when suddenly I saw that it was ten of seven and reminded him about his appointment. He lost another half minute giving me a fight over the check—it was only for two drinks apiece—then gave up and ran.
I paid the check and left more slowly because I was trying to decide whether to call on Honey Howard first, or after eating. I was beginning to get pretty hungry, but duty won when I realized I’d have a better chance of finding her in now than maybe an hour later when she could have left for the evening.
It was another stone front; it was my day for stone fronts. One mailbox had two names on it, Wilcox and Howard, and the number six. But there was no bell button and the door wasn’t locked so I went in and started checking room numbers, found Number Six on the second floor, and knocked.
A tall, quite beautiful colored girl opened the door. But very light colored—far from Hershey-bar—so I felt sure she would be the Wilcox of the two names on the mailbox, Honey Howard’s roommate. I asked her if Miss Howard was there. She said yes, and then stepped back. “Honey, someone to see you.”
And Honey appeared at the doorway instead. Hershey-bar, yes, but petite and very beautiful, much more so than her tall, light roommate.
I gave her my best smile and went into my spiel.
“You might as well come in, Mr. Hunter,” she said, stepping back. I followed her into a nicely furnished, bright and cheerful double room pretty much like the one Uncle Am and I live in on Huron Street.
“I’m willing to help if I can, Mr. Hunter,” she said, “but I hope this won’t take very long. Lissa and I were just about to go out to eat.”
It was the perfect opening. I said, “I’m ravenously hungry myself, Miss Howard. May I invite both of you to have dinner with me? Then we can talk while we eat, and it won’t take up any of anybody’s time.” I grinned at her. “And we’ll all eat for free because I can put it on my client’s expense account.”
She gave a quick glance at her roommate and apparently got an affirmative because she turned back and returned my grin. “All right, especially if it’s on Mr. Nielson. After the way Albee ran out on me without even telling me he was going, guess the Nielsons owe me at least a dinner. Let’s go.”
And we went, although first I instigated a conversation as to where they wanted to go so we could phone for a cab. But the place they wanted to go, I had in fact been intending to go anyway, was only two blocks south on Clark Street, only a few blocks away and they’d rather walk.
It turned out to be a fairly nice restaurant, called Robair’s. The proprietor knew the girls and came over to our table while we were having cocktails and I was introduced to him and he grinned and admitted that his name was really Robert but that he knew how the name was pronounced in French and thought it a little swankier to spell it that way. He was colored and so were the waitresses and most of the clientele, but I was far from being the only ofay in the place.
When I started asking questions, Honey Howard answered them freely, or seemed to. Of course I didn’t ask anything about her personal relationships with him; that was none of my business.
She’d last seen him Thursday evening, two evenings before the time he’d been seen last. No, he hadn’t said anything about going away anywhere, not even about a possibility of his going up to Kenosha to see his father. Nor anything about his job or a possibility of his losing it. But he had been moody and depressed, and had admitted he owed a bundle to his bookie and was worried about it. She’d told him she had fifty bucks saved up and wanted to know if lending him that would help. He’d thanked her but said it would not, that it was a hell of a lot more than that.
No, she hadn’t heard from him since. And she made that convincing by admitting she was a bit hurt about it. Quite a bit, in fact. The least he could have done would have been to telephone her to say goodbye and he hadn’t even done that.
No, she had no idea where he might have gone, except that it would have been another big city—like New York or Los Angeles or San Francisco. He hated small towns. Or maybe Paris—Paris was the only specific place he’d ever talked about wanting to go to.
I considered that for a moment because it was the only specific place that had been mentioned thus far as a place he’d like to go. I asked Honey—we were Honey and Lissa and Ed by now—whether he spoke French. He didn’t, and I pretty well ruled Paris out. With only eight hundred bucks and little chance of getting a job there, it would be a silly place for him to go, however glamorous it might look to him. Besides, with a sudden change of identity that left him no provable antecedents, he’d have hell’s own time getting a passport.
No, I wasn’t going to learn anything helpful from Honey. Jerry Score, tomorrow, would be my last hope. And a slender one.
We’d finished eating by then and I suggested a brandy to top the dinner off. Honey agreed, but Lissa said she had to leave; she worked as hat check girl in a Loop hotel and her shift was from eight-thirty on. She’d just have time to make it.
Honey and I had brandies and, since I’d run out of questions to ask her, she started asking them of me. I saw no reason not to tell her anything I’d learned to date, so I started with Nielson’s phone call and went through my adventures of the day.
She looked at me a moment thoughtfully when I ran down, and smiled a bit mischievously. “Since you want to take a look at it, should we take a look together—at Albee’s pad?”
“You mean you have a key?”
She was fumbling in her purse. “Pair of keys. Outer door and room. Just hadn’t got around to throwing them away.” She found them and handed them to me, two keys fastened together with a loose loop of string.
It was a real break, a chance to see Albee’s pad and to have Honey see it with me. She’d be able to tell me how much of his stuff he’d taken, things like that. Besides, I could get in trouble using those keys by myself. But not if I was with Honey; if he’d given her keys he’d given her the legal right to use them, whether he was there or not. Even Mrs. Radcliffe couldn’t object to our going up there, not that we’d alert her if we could help it.
I bought us each a second brandy on the strength of those keys, then paid the tab and phoned for a taxi.
The landlady’s door stayed closed when we passed it, and we didn’t encounter anyone in the hallway or on the stairs. Albee’s room, No. 9, was the front one on the third floor.
The moment I turned on the light and looked around I saw why Tom Chudakoff had called it a “padded pad.” Except for a dresser there wasn’t a piece of furniture in sight, but the floor was padded almost wall to wall. In one corner was a mattress with bedding and a pillow. The rest of the floor was scattered with green pads, the kind used on patio furniture. In all sizes. You could sit almost anywhere, fall almost anywhere. Real cool.
At the far end a curtain on a string masked what was no doubt the kitchenette, at one side there were two doors, one no doubt leading to a John and the other to a closet.
Honey closed the door and was looking around. She pointed to a bare area of floor on which there was a small stack of LP phonograph records. “His portable phono’s gone. And part of his records. I’ll check the closet.”