I sat back and sipped the cocktail, looking over the interior of the cocktail lounge casually, trying to find out why it was she had been so anxious to get into the place, yet not really caring.
It was Saturday afternoon. I had tailed the man I was shadowing to this hotel and had been waiting for the night shift to come on, to see if I could pick up more information, but that could wait. I had all night.
They were doing a fair business. A heavy-set, beefy man in the late fifties was having the time of his life, putting his personality across with a platinum blonde in the dubious twenties and hard as a diamond. She hadn’t quite made up her mind what to do about him yet, and, while she was smiling at his sallies, her eyes were hard with appraisal.
A foursome was proceeding to wade through the preliminaries of a Saturday night drunk. A young chap with long hair and soulful eyes was pouring forth his political views in an impassioned oration to a good-looking chick who had evidently heard it all before but who admired him enough to keep on listening. A middle-aged man and his wife were making an effort to relieve the monotony of matrimony by ‘dining out’ on Saturday night. Their attempt to be interested in each other was a conscious effort which slipped back occasionally into routine boredom, only to be rescued by a sudden burst of conscious animation.
Then I saw the couple she was interested in.
The man was thirty-two or thirty-three, with an air of grave responsibility about him. His mouth showed that he was accustomed to making decisions. His manner had that certain deferential insistence which characterizes the salesman, and his appearance was worried. He might have been intent upon sedition rather than seduction, from the gravely apprehensive aura with which he surrounded himself.
The girl was five or six years younger, red-headed, grey-eyed, and thoughtful. She wasn’t too good-looking, but there was character about her face, and her manner was that of one who has decided to undergo a critical operation. There was affection in her eyes as she looked at the man, but it was the quiet affection of respect. There wasn’t any passion in it.
I took two more sips of the pallid ice-water in the cocktail glass. It was so weak I could taste the flavour of the olive rather than that of the gin. I decided that it was the woman who interested Lucille.
I pushed the cocktail glass back across the table.
“And I can’t go mine,” Lucille said. “It’s nauseating.”