A. Fair - Owls Don't Blink

“Well — well, not exactly.”

“Why, then?”

“I’d rather let it go just the way it is.”

I shook my head. “You can’t.”

She said, “Well, to tell you the truth, in part I got tired of the life I was living. I wasn’t working. I was getting all of my expenses paid simply to stay there and take the name of Edna Cutler. I wasn’t getting up until along about eleven or twelve o’clock in the morning. I’d go to breakfast, take a little walk, pick up some magazines, come back, read and doze during the afternoon, go out about seven o’clock for a bite to eat, come back, take a bath, put on my glad rags, take a lot of care with my make-up, and groom myself up to the minute. Then I’d either have a date, or else I’d drift across to one of the bars, and — well, you know how it is in New Orleans. It isn’t like any other city on earth. A girl sits in the bar, and men pick her up. They don’t think anything of it, and neither does the girl. In any other city, you’d wonder what sort she was, but — well. New Orleans is New Orleans.”

The waiter brought our daiquiris. We touched glasses, took the first sip.

The waiter stood by the table, exerting a silent pressure for our orders.

“Could you bring some oysters on the half shell with a lot of cocktail sauce, some horseradish and lemon?” I asked. “Then bring us some of those cold, peppered shrimp, some onion soup, a steak about three inches thick, done medium rare, some French-fried onions, shoestring potatoes, cut some French bread, put on lots of butter, sprinkle on just a trace of garlic, put it in the oven, let it get good and hot so the butter melts all through the bread, put some sparkling Burgundy on the ice, and after that bring us a dish of ice cream, a huge pot of coffee, and the check.”

The waiter never batted an eyelash. “I could do that very nicely, sir.”

“How about you?” I asked Roberta.

“I could go for that in a big way.”

I nodded to the waiter, waited until the green curtains had dropped back into place, and said suddenly to Roberta, “Where were you at two-thirty a.m. Thursday?”

She said, “If I told you what happened that night, you wouldn’t believe it.”

“Bad as that?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me then.”

She said, “I’d kept away from Nostrander. He didn’t know I was in New Orleans; then he found me. You were there when he found me. You heard what he said. It was the first time I’d seen him for two years. I didn’t want to have a scene in front of you. The last time I had seen him, he had been absolutely crazy about me. In fact, he had a jealousy complex. That was one of the things which made him so distasteful to me. Whenever I’d try to go out with anyone else, he’d go absolutely crazy-I mean that literally. He was a very brilliant man, but completely unstable. Heaven help the woman whoever married him! He wouldn’t have let even the milkman come to the house.”

“Is that why you took him out in the corridor the night I was at your apartment?”

“Yes I knew he had a gun, and I was afraid he was going to do something desperate. When he saw you there he almost pulled his gun. I took him out m the corridor. He was insanely jealous of you. I told him I’d never seen you before, that you were a business visitor. He wouldn’t believe me. He thought, finding you in my apartment, that you were the privileged boy friend. He pulled his gun, said he’d shoot me and kill himself if I didn’t go out with him, and went through all for dramatics. So I told him that the reason I hadn’t seen him, and the reason I hadn’t gone with him was because of that very trait in his character, that if he’d put that gun back in his pocket and quit all that crazy jealousy, I’d go out to dinner with him, and we’d have a few drinks.”

“He wanted to know all about me?” I asked.

“Oh, of course.”

“What did you tell him?”

“I told him the truth. I told him you were a detective who was trying to find out something about a man by the name of Smith in order to close up an estate.”

“Did he ask you who Smith was?”

“Oh, certainly. You mention any man’s name, and he’d pounce on it like a hawk swooping on a baby chick. He’d want to know all about him, who he was, where he came from, how long you’d known him, and all that. I told him Smith was a friend of Edna’s.”

“And he did all that out in the corridor?”

“No, not out in the corridor. I told him that I didn’t have time to stand there and argue with him. I was going to have to get rid of you if I was going to dinner with him. So he agreed to wait.”

“That’s the point I’m interested in,” I said. “Where did he wait?”

“He said he’d wait outside somewhere, and come back after you’d gone.”

“Did he?”

“What?”

“Come back after I’d left?”

“Yes. Within less than a minute.”

She saw the expression on my face. “What’s the matter? What are you scowling about?”

“I was trying to think back,” I said. “As I remember it, there’s only one string of apartments in that building. It’s over a storeroom, and the corridor runs the length of the building, with apartments on both sides, isn’t that right?”

“Yes.”

“There are no bends or crooks in the corridor where a man might hide?”

“No.”

“I didn’t see him there when I went out.”

“He might have gone over to the far end and flattened himself in the shadows where he could watch you, without your knowing he was there. That’s the way he would do things. He was secretive and liked to spy on people. Good heavens, when I was living there in the Quarter, you’d have thought I was an enemy alien, and he was the whole F.B.I. He snooped around, watched my apartment window with binoculars. When I’d go out with anyone, he’d be hanging around somewhere to find out what time I got in. I didn’t even dare to take a boy friend upstairs to have a drink—”

The waiter appeared with a tray, put dishes on the table. We started eating.

“Want to hear the rest of it?” she asked, after a few moments.

“After dinner,” I said. “Let’s concentrate on eating now. I’m hungry.”-

We ate our way through dinner. I could see that her nerves were relaxing. The wine and the food generated a mood of expansive friendship.

“Know something, Donald?”

“What?”

“I feel that I can trust you. I’m going to tell you the whole truth.”

“Why not?”

She pushed away her plate, accepted one of my cigarettes, and leaned forward for a light. She reached up with her hands and held my hand and the match m both of hers. Her hands were soft and warm, the skin smooth. “Paul and I went out to dinner. He was going to kill you,” she said.

“He got drunk and crazy jealous again. He began asking me a lot of questions about you. He wouldn’t believe you were a detective. Finally I got sore, and told him that he hadn’t changed a bit m the last two years, that I’d tried to let him down easy once by simply moving out, but this time I was giving it to him the hard way; that I didn’t want to see him again ever and I didn’t want to have anything to do with him; that it he ever tried to force himself on me, I’d call the officers.”

“What did he do then?”

“He did something that frightened me, and at the same time it made me laugh.”

“What?”

“He grabbed my purse.”

“Why? So you wouldn’t have any money?”

“That’s what I thought at the time, but I realized later what it was.”

“You mean he wanted your key?”

“Yes.”

“Where were you when he took your purse?”

“In Jack O’Leary’s Bar down in the Quarter. That was always his regular hangout.”