There was a sputtering sound at the other end of the line, then a wash of confused silence.
"Do I?" Fleetwood persisted.
"Y-yes," Dermitt said in a greatly reduced tone of voice. "I guess so." There was another beat of silence, then a spate of false laughter. "Of course I still think this is all just a gag."
"Sure," Fleetwood said, "you'll be sick with laughter."
Grant Dermitt lived on the ninth floor of the Towers, where, as Fleetwood observed, the swank began in the foyer and increased, from floor to floor, as you went up. The brocaded elevator attendant glided in for a smooth landing, slid back the doors and confided in muted tones that Mr. Dermitt's digs lay due north and could best be reached by taking a steady heading in that direction. Fleetwood nodded with thanks and proceeded on schedule and according to plan.
He presented himself at the door marked 9-B and pressed the buzzer, not, however without a pause first for a deep meditative breath. There was no question in his mind that his next step, the one that would take him across Mr. Grant Dermitt's door-sill, would be the most decisive in his entire life. He poised himself, therefore, in an appropriate attitude of semi-military vigilance and waited for the encounter to take place.
There was hardly any lapse between the sound of the buzzer inside the apartment and the echo of rapidly approaching footsteps. The footsteps, however, for all their orderly progression, stopped abruptly just short of the inner side of the door. In the pause that followed, Fleetwood reflected with understanding sympathy that he was not alone in the need to brace himself against the impending interview, and he found courage in this fact. Then the door opened and zero hour had arrived.
Never had Fleetwood seen a larger, blacker pair of spectacles, nor indeed had he even suspected that there was such a pair in existence. In fact it was not until he had recovered from the shock of these spectacular glasses that he was able to give their wearer so much as a thought. It was only then that he came to the decision that perhaps it wasn't so much that the glasses were large but that Grant Dermitt was small.
Dermitt could not have been over five and a half feet tall, and his head was large and flat on top so as to give him an odd, hammered-down appearance. Though he was obviously somewhere in the mid-thirties, his face had retained the alarming pinkness of adolescence. Through his glasses he peered up at Fleetwood with a sort of thoughtful horror.