“Second booth, where the new glass is in.” He would have been pleased to give gory details. “Johnny’d been right here at th’ bar, no more’n a cork pop from where you’re standin’ now. Tommy, there, just give him a ryeball on th’ house,” like an impresario he waved at a lanky barman with handlebar mustaches, evidently a celebrity since the assassination.
I would have asked whether Miss Eberlein had been present at the time of the gunplay, but something told me my inquiry would not have been courteously received. I drifted toward the phone booth. Halfway there, I spotted Edie. She wore black, with a rope of pearls big enough for an elephant’s collar. She was at a table with a brassy babe in a vermilion getup with a neckline that plunged way down to there, obviously not the kind of damsel discussed in polite circles of Burlington, Vermont.
They were ten tables away. Intervening quaffing and laffing made it impossible to hear what Edie was saying. But there were three Tom Collins glasses on their table.
I headed for a door demurely labeled: Used Beer Department, bumped into Yaker coming out.
He’d cut himself shaving. He smelled like a bar sink. The fawn gabardine he’d borrowed from Walch fitted him like a Cub Scout uniform. He boggled at me, glassy-eyed, trying to place me. I went in the men’s room, gave him a minute to wend his way between the cram-jammed tables, went out again.
He was dunking his nose in the Collins, listening to a tongue-lashing from Edie, when I pulled up a spare chair. I thought La Eberlein was going to keel over with apoplexy. She was practically speechless, but the few choice epithets she did sputter out were really pier-six stuff.
I didn’t fool around. “That key, Miss E. One I got out of your bag.”
“You got a nerve like a ulcerated tooth. Comin’ to my table without bein’—”
“Remember? You said the guest gave the key to you. I asked the guest. She said she never gave it to you.”
Plunging Neckline was dumfounded and scared; she wanted out. Yaker pawed soddenly at liquor dribbling off his chin. Edie cursed me till she ran short of breath. She clenched her glass as if to hurl the drink in my face. I did what I could to appear calm and unflustered. My insides were doing nip-ups; Edie’s loud scrawking was attracting the attention of several meaneyed waiters.