“About some acid, maybe. If you thought it was worth a hundred dollars—”
She left it hanging there, and then I caught something in the background that made the pulse leap in my throat. It was the rough whirring sound of that fan with the defective bearing.
“Yes,” I said, trying to keep the excitement out of my voice. “It might be worth that. Where could I meet you?”
“You can’t,” she said softly. “I wouldn’t risk it for a thousand, let alone a hundred. But if you get the money for me, I’ll phone—” She stopped abruptly, gasped, and the receiver clicked as she hung up.
I dropped the instrument back on the cradle and was out the door in three strides. The entrance to the Silver King was in plain sight from here. Nobody came out I almost ran, going across. When I pushed into the lunchroom a lone trucker was at the counter and the waitress was emerging from the kitchen with a tray. I forced myself to slow down and strolled casually into the bar.
It was empty, except for Ollie. He was disassembling and cleaning a big salt-water reel on a newspaper spread out on the bar. I looked stupidly around. He glanced up and sighed. “Corrosion,” he said.
“Where’d she go?” I asked.
“Who?”
“The woman that just used the phone booth.”
“In here?” he stared at me, frowning. “There hasn’t been any woman here. There hasn’t been anybody since just after you left.”
6
He was telling the truth, or he was one of the great actors of all time. But there had to be some explanation. He went on watching me as if I’d gone crazy as I wheeled and strode to the doorway at the rear beside the jukebox. The rest rooms were on either side of a short, dead-ended hall. They were both empty and there was no way out back here.
The kitchen, then—I came out of the hall, half-running, and then braked to a stop in front of the phone booth. It should have occurred to me before I stepped inside, took down the receiver and held it against my ear. Ollie wasn’t lying; nobody had called from here. It had still been less than a minute, and the handset was as cool as the air-conditioned room.
Then I was going crazy, because the little fan was making exactly the noise I’d heard. And had heard the other time. There was no doubt of it. I shook my head in bewilderment and went over to the bar.
“I owe you an apology,” I said. I told him about it, without mentioning what the woman had called for.
He nodded thoughtfully. “Then there’s another one.”
“Not in this town,” I said. “I checked every booth in it except the phone company and stores. And it couldn’t have been those because I heard a jukebox.”
“I don’t get it,” he said.
I heard the front door of the lunch-room open, and the sound of hard heels behind me. Ollie reached into the ice-box, uncapped a bottle of beer, and placed it on the bar to the left of me. I turned. It was Pearl Talley. He was still wearing the same flamboyant shirt, apparently with a few added food stains. I noticed now he was larger than I’d thought, probably close on two hundred pounds. He looked soft.
“Howdy, men,” he said, and grinned at us with that odd combination of blue-eyed innocence and sly humor, like some precociously lewd but none too intelligent baby.
Ollie introduced us. He stuck out his hand. “Sure proud to meet you,” he said. “Doggone if you ain’t a big one. Like to see you and ol’ Calhoun mix it up.” He pronounced it Kayul-hoon.
I shook hands with him, wishing the populace of this place would stop trying to match me with Calhoun. He took off the white hat, placed it on the bar beside him, and wiped the perspiration from his brow with his left forefinger, using it like a windshield swipe and giving it a little flip at the end which snapped the moisture onto the floor. He looked older with the hat off. The sandy hair was receding across the top of his head, revealing a large area of scalp as glistening and white as the inner membrane of a boiled egg.
“Doggone if she ain’t a real scorcher out there,” he said.
He had a backwoods Southern accent that might have appeared overdone to the point of burlesque on a stage but seemed perfectly natural in him. Any other time I