Quite evidently it was noisy inside the bar. People emerging to Stand on the sidewalk stood close and shouted at each other.
Following the New Orleans custom in the French Quarter, garbage pails were placed on the sidewalks near the curb. Everyone felt it was the height of wit to kick the covers off the garbage pails and listen to them make noise as they slid along the sidewalk.
After half an hour, I crossed over to a chair, sat down, and let my eyes drift around the half-illuminated apartment. Roberta Fenn had lived in this same apartment some three years ago, which would have been 1939. She had rented it under an assumed name; then she had disappeared into thin air. Cool and Lam — Confidential Investigations had been hired to find her.
Sitting there in the warm darkness, I tried to reconstruct the life Roberta Fenn must have lived. She must have heard the same sounds I was hearing. She must have eaten at the near-by restaurants, had drinks at the bars, perhaps spent some of her time at Jack O’Leary’s Bar across the street.
The heavy, semitropical air emphasized the warmth of the night. I dropped off to fitful sleep.
At 5:30 I wakened enough to stagger over to the bed. I felt I had never been so sleepy in my life. The persons who had been doing the celebrating had gone home. The street was enjoying an interval of quiet. I sank instantly into deep slumber and almost immediately the bell of the alarm clock pulled me back to wakefulness.
Six-thirty!
I was to meet Bertha Cool at 7:20.
Chapter Two
I felt certain the man with Bertha Cool would be the New York lawyer. He was a tall, rangy man in the late fifties with long arms. A dentist had evidently tried to lengthen his face when he made the dental plates.