These little adventures didn’t come to him in that precise order. The beer affair had been first. That, and the search for the key; for the circumstances of the first as good as dictated the action of the second.
Horne had been sitting on the studio couch in the living room, staring thoughtfully at the newspaper he had just read and waiting for Betty to appear for lunch. He was hungry and happy for he saw, or thought he saw, the breaks beginning to fall for him instead of against him.
The discovery of Robinson in the hotel would start things moving. And Sergeant Wiedenbeck was the kind of a man to keep things moving with a discovery like Robinson.
Doctor Saari, assuming the police had called her in on the case, would have the man awake and talking in no time. Perhaps they already knew the answers — why not? That newspaper had gone to press at three in the morning and Robinson had evidently been found some hours before that. He had been in the hospital several hours by this time; long enough to get a statement from him and begin working on it.
Horne fought back the silly impulse to glance out the front window with the expectation of seeing a swarm of men already approaching the house. It wouldn’t be that fast.
Instead he jumped to his feet and stared at the sight in the bedroom doorway.
Betty stood there, poised, smiling, anxious.
Horne exclaimed, “Ye gods!”
“Thank you, sir.” she curtsied. “That, I take it, is your quaint way of passing a compliment. Do you like me?”
The auburn-haired girl was wearing a two-piece playsuit. The suit was a dark shade of green with a lustre finish. Each of the two pieces was pornographically brief. At least Horne thought so.
“I haven’t,” he declared, “seen so much bare skin on the beach!”
“Can’t say I didn’t warn you,” she flipped. “It’s from France. I like it. Let’s have lunch.” She extended an arm.
He accepted it gingerly and walked with her to the kitchen. Seating her first, he sat down, avoiding direct stares at the playsuit and avoiding the eyes of both Betty and Hilda.
Still lacking a shirt to wear, he felt extremely conscious of the near-nakedness of the two of them. Betty’s mind, he realized for the thousandth time, rattled along in channels one couldn’t fully approve of. She seemed to deliberately practice the disconcerting habit of embarrassing him at every opportunity. And she thoroughly enjoyed it.
He discovered how hard it was to eat with his eyes on his plate for the entire meal.
Sometime after lunch Betty opened two bottles of beer for a refresher. And that was the beginning of it.
She silently handed him that first bottle while he was standing before the garish juke box in the long living room, arranging for it to play the twelve records without stopping. It was with surprise and wonderment that he looked up suddenly from one end of the studio couch to see why the records had ceased. The twelve platters had run their course and settled back into their respective places. He had no idea what had happened to the time needed to play those twelve records.
Betty’s head rested on a pillow lying in his lap. Her great green eyes were looking upward, watching his face in contented contemplation. Her lips were still.
Horne roused himself from his protracted spell of woolgathering and set the empty beer bottle on the floor. It clinked against another. Glancing down, he discovered seven empty bottles standing there, his and hers stacked together.
“I’m one up on you,” he said stupidly. “Or is it the other way around?”
“I don’t know, darling,” she half said, half whispered. “I don’t care.”
Sinking his chin to his chest he found he could stare down directly into her face. He put a long, cold forefinger on the tip of her nose and wobbled it gently from side to side. “That makes you look like a rabbit,” he informed her. “Only rabbits’ noses go up and down, not sideways.”
“I’ll be a sideways rabbit,” she answered dreamily.
“I never seen a red-haired rabbit.”
“I never saw...”
“Huh? Saw what?”
“I never saw a red-haired rabbit.”
“Neither have I.”
He set his empty beer bottle on the floor. It clinked. The clink sounded familiar and he looked to see what caused it. Placing his finger on the rim of each bottle in turn, so as not to count any bottle twice, he tallied up eleven bottles. That couldn’t be right; he must have counted one of them twice. So he turned the first bottle over on its side and counted the evidence again. Correct — there were only ten. Then he discovered that he had forgotten to count the bottle lying on its side.
“Who’s bringing all that beer in here?” he demanded.
“Bumble is. You asked him to.”
“Bumble can’t hear what I say.”
“But darling, you wave bottles at him.”
“Oh.”
“He brought up another case from the basement.”
“I thought I saw somebody lugging cases around out there.” And then a wonderful idea smote him. “We shouldn’t make Bumble work like that.”
“He doesn’t mind.”
“I do. I’ll tell you what we’re going to do. We’re going to put a tub of ice-cold beer right here by the couch. We’ll fill it up with all the ice cubes in the refrigerator. And then Bumble won’t have to wait on us all the time.”
She sat up. “Wonderful!” Calling Hilda, Betty explained what was wanted. Hilda waddled into the kitchen and shortly Bumble returned lugging a galvanized wash tub containing a dozen bottles of beer and the contents of four trays of ice cubes. He set the tub within easy reach of Horne, and went back to the kitchen.
“Now that,” Horne declared, “is more like it. Bumble won’t have to work so hard.”
“I know what,” Betty said breathlessly, “I’ll give them the afternoon off. I’ll send them to town. And then we can be alone.”
“Give them a quarter,” Horne nodded. “Tell them to take in a double feature.” He reached into the tub and opened a bottle of beer. Looking up, he came face to face with a dog.
“Nice pup,” he said, and gave the dog a friendly pat on the top of the head. The dog backed away, growling. Betty returned to her position in his lap.
“It seems to me,” he opined, “I’ve seen that pup somewhere before. Does he live around here?”
“That’s my dog. He stays in the yard.”
“Then what’s he doing in here?”
“Hilda always lets him in when she and Bumble leave,” Betty explained. “He takes care of me.”
“Safety first,” Horne said wisely. He vaguely felt there was some deep sense to her statement, something more to be read into it than appeared on the surface, but at the moment it escaped him. “Safety first,” he repeated. “Nice pup.”
The dog settled down on the opposite side of the tub, watching them. It seemed to Horne that every time he bent over the tub to get another bottle the dog was staring into his eyes in a most curious manner.
“I can’t see from here,” Betty said as if answering him.
“Can’t see what from there?” he prompted.
“How many empty bottles there are.”
He shrugged. “Who cares?”
“You do. You just asked me to count them.”
“Oh.” He leaned over the arm of the couch to count them aloud. To prevent the kind of mistake that had happened before, he again put a bottle over on its side and counted the remainder. When he got back to the original bottle he found there were two, not one, lying down.
“Oh, hell,” he complained. “I’ve lost count.”
“Never mind. There’s more in the basement.”