“Let’s try the brassy-blonde lady with the silver foxes. She looks pretty permanent; maybe she’ll stay for a complete go-round. How about another drink?”
“Well, I shouldn’t,” she said a little uncertainly. “I’m afraid I’m just talking shop and boring you terribly. Well, maybe I
will
have just one more, if you don’t think I’ll be too intoxicated. I’m trusting you to keep track and not let me disgrace myself. Although I’m not at all sure you’re a trustworthy person, Mr. Corcoran.”
She was putting on a much better show than she had earlier in the evening. By this time she had the flushed, bright-eyed, vivacious, faintly disorganized look of the unpracticed lady drinker who’s overdoing it. Anybody could tell her inhibitions were taking an awful beating. On more intimate terms now, we discussed my trustworthiness, or lack of it, at length and in laughing detail. I looked up to see the waiter standing by the table.
“One more of each,” I said, shoving the empty glasses toward him.
“I’m sorry, sir.” He gestured toward the bar, where the last man on duty was shutting up shop. We were alone in the lounge.
“Oh, dear,” Olivia said, “Are they closing up? Do we have to go? We never did learn how long it takes to go around.”
“The bar?” said the waiter. “It takes about fifteen minutes, ma’am.”
I paid the bill, rose, and helped Olivia to get around the table the waiter pulled away from the bench.
She held my arm to steady herself. “I’m afraid I’m just a wee bit inebriated, Mr. Corcoran. It’s a very interesting experiment. I’ve always wanted to try it—in the interest of science, of course—but I’ve always been afraid of making a fool of myself. Am I?”
“What, making a fool of yourself?” I said. “Not yet, Doc, but I’m still hoping.”
“Now I’m sure you’re not to be trusted!” She laughed, and stopped laughing. “Do I look all right? My hair isn’t coming down, is it? I look like an utter witch with my hair down. Not that I’m any beauty with it up, don’t think I have any illusions along those lines. It’s really very kind of you to... She stopped and drew a long breath, leaving the sentence unfinished. We were out in the lobby and they were locking the doors of the Carnival Room behind us. Olivia drew herself up and patted her hair, facing me. When she spoke again, her voice was brisk and business-like and sober. “You’ve been very considerate, Mr. Corcoran, listening to the boring prattle of a lonely woman. No, you don’t have to see me to my room. I’m perfectly all right.”
I cleared my throat. “Well, I was kind of thinking of
my
room, ma’am. It seems a pity to break this up. I’ve got a bottle in my suitcase. We could continue the scientific experiment, er, in private.”
It was funny. We were acting—with some help from the drinks, of course. We were going through the age-old motions of the pickup for the benefit of anyone who might be watching. And yet the tight, embarrassed little silence that followed my suggestion was real enough. Olivia’s laugh was slow to come, and strained when it did come.
“Oh, my dear man!” she murmured. “My dear man! Are you going to flatter the unattractive lady intellectual by making a real pass? Isn’t that carrying the Good Samaritan act pretty far?”
“We’re going to have to do something about that inferiority complex, Doc,” I said. “I don’t like to hear a good-looking woman running herself down.”
“You know I’m drunk, deliciously drunk, and you’re deliberately taking advantage of a foolish, intoxicated... Do I really want to be seduced, Mr. Corcoran?” I didn’t say anything. We faced each other for some long seconds; then she laughed again softly and recklessly. “Well, why not?” she asked, taking my arm again, in an intimate way. “Why not?”
We stood very close in the elevator for the operator’s benefit; we didn’t speak because it wasn’t necessary. We got out at the fifth floor, turned left, and walked arm in arm to my door. I put the key into the lock. With the door opening under my hand, I turned to look at my companion.
There was something I’d forgotten. I wondered if she had. There was one affectionate little scene still to be played for our public, if we had one, before we could escape into the privacy of the room and be our cool, distant and professional selves once more.
I saw a sharp little glint in Olivia’s eyes, and I knew she’d been wondering if I’d try to leave this particular chore undone. I reached out, took the glasses gently from her nose, folded them, and tucked them into the breast pocket of her jacket while she stood quite still facing me. Then I kissed her. It wasn’t too difficult. The woman wasn’t actually revolting, and I was moderately tight myself. She wasn’t too clumsy, either. At least she knew where the noses went.
I had time to be a little surprised at this. After all, she didn’t give the impression of having had much recent practice, if she’d ever had any. Then I sensed somebody behind me, and, releasing her, I turned, ready, and caught a glimpse of a man’s face that might have been handsome if it hadn’t been contorted with anger. It wasn’t a face I’d ever seen before.
That changed the picture. I’d been expecting Kroch. I had to make a snap decision and I made it. Instead of going into action, I just stood there flat-footed and let a fist catch me on the jaw and knock me against the doorjamb. Another fist to my stomach doubled me up. A third fist—well, maybe my count wasn’t quite accurate, maybe the guy had only two but it seemed like more— took me alongside the head and knocked me down.
It took a bit of doing, of course. No man really likes to be used as a punching bag in front of a woman, even if she isn’t quite Sophia Loren. There was even a certain risk, but an attacker who really means business seldom wastes his time and effort with the fists. You get so you can sense when there is real danger, and when the worst that can happen is getting your block knocked off in an amateurish way.
A moment after I’d hit the hall carpet, Olivia was kneeling beside me. Her hand touched my face, but her words weren’t addressed to me.
“That was brave!” I heard her cry. “To attack a man from behind, without warning! That’s just what I would have expected from you, Harold!”
“You were going into his room!” Harold, whoever he was, had a fine baritone, with indignant overtones.
“And why not? It wouldn’t be the first time I’d gone into a man’s room, would it? Not quite the first!”
“Look at you!” he cried, ignoring this. “Letting a cynical reporter—oh, I asked about him at the desk—ply you with liquor until you can hardly stand and bring you up here! He was laughing at you, Olivia, couldn’t you see? He just thought it was an amusing way to spend an evening. It meant nothing to him, nothing at all.”
She said fiercely, “That’s right, nothing! No more than it meant to you. You’re a fine one to criticize other men’s motives!”
“Olivia—”
“Do you think I didn’t know what he was doing?” she demanded. “All right, so it amused him to be charming to the mousy lady scientist. Maybe it amused me to play up to him! Maybe I thought it would be entertaining to deliberately let a slick, experienced character like that get me drunk and... and lure me to his room for immoral purposes. After all, I seem to be susceptible to slick characters, and what does it matter now? At least he was honest, Harold. At least he said nothing about love!”
I would have liked to listen to them longer, but they were being pretty loud and somebody in a neighboring room might get tired of the noise and call the manager. I’d learned about as much as I could hope for. I stirred, therefore, groaned, and opened my eyes. I sat up dazedly. Olivia helped me. I looked up at the man who had slugged me.
He was in his late twenties or early thirties with a roughhewn touch of Lincoln or Gregory Peck about the physiognomy, carefully cultivated. It was obvious that regardless of what might have come between them lately, he and Olivia were born to be soulmates. His tweeds were every bit as tweedy as hers, and his glasses were no less thick and black in the rims. They gave him a sincere and earnest look.
“If you’d only let me explain!” he was saying.
She wasn’t looking at him any more. “Are you all right, Paul?” she asked.
“You’re making a terrible mistake,” Harold protested. “If you’d only listen, darling! You completely misunderstood what you heard in the office that day. Miss Darden and I were only—”
She didn’t turn her head. “Haven’t you done enough? Do you have to wake the whole hotel, too? You can’t persuade me there was any misunderstanding. You and your nurse made it all perfectly plain. I could hear you clear out in the waiting room, every word. You should really close the door before you indulge in private jokes with your employees, Harold!”
“It wasn’t what you thought—”
“I heard my name quite plainly.” Her voice was harsh. “The GLP complex, you called it, meaning grateful lady patient. Apparently it’s a recognized syndrome and one of which unscrupulous medical practitioners sometimes take advantage, as you did. Well, this lady patient is no longer grateful, Dr. Mooney. Good-bye!”
She helped me to my feet. The guy was still standing there, still protesting, but she never looked at him. She just led me into my room and closed the door behind us. Then she turned and locked it carefully. Finally she faced me again and raised both hands to her hair, smoothing it back from her temples wearily.
“Phew!” she said softly. “Well, there you have my private reason for not receiving telephone calls, Mr. Corcoran. I hope you approve of the performance I put on for him.”
“A little more practice and we’ll have you in the movies,” I said.
I stepped up to the door and listened. There was no sound outside. Presently I heard the elevator doors clang shut far down the hall. I turned back to Olivia to find that she’d gone over to sit in the big chair with which my room, like hers, was provided.
“Dr. Harold Mooney,” I said. “Doctor of what?”
“Obstetrics and gynecology,” she said. “He’s a specialist in women’s diseases. Also, I’m afraid, in women. He’s quite a specimen, isn’t he? Genus Casanova, species phony. He’s come all the way from Pensacola to plead for forgiveness, he says, but what he’s
really
frightened of is that I’ll make a scandal and ruin his profitable practice. As if I’d want to let people know what a fool I’ve been!”
She drew a long, uneven breath, fished for her glasses in her pocket, and put them back on. After a moment, she unbuttoned her jacket, unfastened the snug round collar of her silk blouse, sighed with relief, leaned back comfortably, and stuck her legs out in front of her, a little apart. Her attitude was mildly defiant as if she was aware that this pose was neither graceful nor ladylike and to hell with it. She looked up and saw me rubbing my jaw.
“I thought you people were supposed to be able to take care of yourselves,” she murmured with a touch of malice.
I said, “What did you want me to do, pitch him out of a fifth-floor window with a judo throw, or crack a couple of vertebrae with a karate chop to the neck? Besides leaving us the problem of disposing of a body, those are hardly techniques you’d attribute to a dissipated lecherous Denver reporter. Besides, there’s the possibility that we may want the guy alive.”
She frowned quickly. “What do you mean?”
I looked down at her. Her relaxed posture allowed a lot of leg to show. There was even some lingerie on display; a nice bit of cream-colored slip with darker, coffee-colored lace, pretty and provocative and completely out of character—but then, so was a love affair with a handsome doctor. Somebody had obviously slipped, digging out her background; she’d managed to keep some things well concealed. There was obviously more to Dr. Olivia Mariassy than her plain, tweedy, unpromising exterior had seemed to indicate.
“Where did you meet this guy?” I asked.
“In his office. Although we’re kind of attached to the Naval Air Station and use their facilities, we don’t officially rate attention from the Navy doctors, and being a doctor myself I detest people who try to scrounge free medical service they’re not entitled to. Later, I met Dr. Mooney at a cocktail party in town. He remembered me, which was flattering. Most men don’t, as a person, although they may remember me as a scientist.” She spoke in a dry, detached voice. “We talked about medicine and other things. We had dinner together that night and other nights. You can guess the rest.”
“Sure.” I crossed the room to the phone, and activated the New Orleans-Denver-Washington circuits for the second time that night. “Never mind switching me upstairs,” I said to the girl when I got the number. “Just have them run a fast check on Mooney, Harold—M.D. in obstetrics and gynecology and don’t ask me how to spell it. Home base, Pensacola, Florida. Let me have it here in the morning, whatever you can get at once; in the meantime tell them to put somebody to really digging for dirt. Check his home, his office, everything. Any word on Karl Kroch yet?”
There wasn’t, which was odd. Generally they can run down a man with a record in the business pretty fast, and I was willing to bet Kroch’s record was long and gaudy. I hung up. Olivia hadn’t moved.
“Karl Kroch?” she said. “Is that the man—”
“The one who was watching us in the bar downstairs, earlier this evening. The one who was so mean to the little girl in pink. The one we wanted, I thought. Now I’m not so sure.”
“Because of Harold?” Her eyes followed me as I came back across the room. “You’re wrong, Mr. Corcoran. I can see your line of reasoning, of course, but you’re wrong.”
I said, “We put on an act, Doc. We met cute, we got drunk cute, we indicated we were going to make love cute, just to see who’d be interested. Well, there were distractions, but a fish finally took the bait, didn’t he? Your friend Mooney had obviously been watching us off and on. He admits he even checked on me at the desk.”
She was still lying back in the big chair, relaxed and surprisingly careless about what showed and what didn’t, considering where she was and what she was. I reminded myself that I was no longer quite sure what she was. The longer this night went on, it seemed, the less sure I was about anything.
“It’s plausible,” she said thoughtfully, “it’s plausible, but it’s wrong. The man who’s watching me is supposed to be a trained professional killer, isn’t he? Well, Harold couldn’t commit that kind of crime if his life depended on it. He hasn’t got the nerve, Mr. Corcoran. Swinging a fist at a man who isn’t looking is just about his limit. He’s a... a handsome phony. I know.” She grimaced.
“Now
I know.”