"You think so?"
"It could be."
"By golly, I believe you're right," I said. This is the only way to handle Alvarez when he talks nonsense. If you give him the slightest degree of resistance, he will argue along the same line till doomsday, just to prove he can.
"Mmm," he said thoughtfully, screwing up his face. "No, I don't—think—so."
"No?"
"No," he said positively. "You notice how the thing seems to travel around the room?" He nodded to a fist fight that was breaking out a few yards from us, and then to a goosed girl leaping over by the bar entrance. "There's a kind of irregular rhythm to it." He moved his hand, illustrating. "One thing happens—then another thing—now here it comes around this way again—"
A fat friend of a friend and her husband backed up against the platform just below us, quivering. There was something wrong with my fingers; they felt warm. The collins glass was turning warm. Warm, hell—I yelped and dropped it, sucking my fingers. The glass looped and fell neatly on the flowered hat of the friend of a friend, and liquid splattered. The woman hooted like a peanut whistle. She whirled, slipped in the puddle and lurched off into the arms of a hairy authors' agent. Her husband dithered after her a couple of steps, then came back with blood in his eye. He got up as far as the piano stool when, as far as I could make out, his pants split up the back and he climbed down again, glaring and clutching himself.
"Now it's over in the middle," said Ray imperturbably. "It might be poltergeists, I won't say it isn't. But I've got a hunch there's another answer, actually."
I said something dubious. A hotel-manager-looking kind of a man had just come in and was looking wildly around. Punchy Carrol went up to him, staring him respectfully right in the eye, talking a quiet six to his dozen. After a moment he gave up and listened. I've known Punchy ever since she was a puppy-eyed greenhorn from Philadelphia, and I don't underestimate her any more. I knew the manager-type would go away and not call any cops—at least for a while.
I glanced down at the floor, and then looked again. There were little flat chips of ice scattered in the wetness. That could have been from the ice cubes; but there was frost on some of the pieces of glass.