Talk of The Town Read Free Page B

with a green wall-to-wall carpet and twin beds with dark green spreads and a chest of drawers with a big mirror above it. There were a couple of armchairs. On the left at the rear a door holding a full length mirror opened into the bathroom that was finished in forest-green tile. It was hot, but there was a room air-conditioner mounted in the wall near the closed and curtained window at the rear. I turned it on. In a moment cool air began to flow out. I stripped off my sweaty clothes and took a shower. The towels, I noted, were worn and threadbare, the type of thing you’d expect in a cheap hotel room. Contrasted with the good quality of the permanent furnishings, they told their story. She was probably going broke. I frowned thoughtfully, and then shrugged and poured out a whisky. Lighting a cigarette, I lay down naked on one of the beds.
    It would be better when I had something to do. Some kind of hard work, I thought, maybe out in the sun, something I could get hold of with my hands. Building something. That was it. You made something with your hands and it was tangible. There were no people mixed up in it, no fouled-up emotions, no abstractions like right and wrong, and you couldn’t throw away six years’ work in five crazy minutes.
    I thought of the house up there on the side of Twin Peaks with the fog coming in like a river of cotton across the city in the late afternoon, and I thought of Nan. There wasn’t any particular feeling about it any more, except possibly one of failure and aimlessness. We’d been divorced for over a year. The house was sold. The job was gone—the job she’d blamed our failure on.
    I took a drag on the cigarette and gazed up at the ceiling, wondering if she’d read about it when it finally happened. She’d married again and moved to Santa Barbara, but some of her friends in the Bay area might have written her about it or sent her the clippings. There’d been no word from her, but there was no reason why she should write. She wasn’t the kind for that ‘I told you so’ routine, and there wasn’t much else to say. I hoped they hadn’t sent her that picture. It was a little rough. So was the simple caption: VICTIM OF POLICE BRUTALITY.
    I crushed out the cigarette and sat up. If I spent the whole afternoon cooped up in a room with my thoughts I’d be walking up the walls. I thought of Mrs. Langston, and that telephoning creep who had her headed for a crack-up. The phone directory was over on the chest. No, I thought sourly; the hell with it. It was nothing to me, was it?
    He’d be gone, anyway, by this time, so what good would it do?
    But the idea persisted, and I went over and picked up the small phone book. It presented a challenge, and it would kill the afternoon, wouldn’t it? I grabbed up my pen and a sheet of stationery, and flipped through the yellow pages.
    Cafés. . . . There were eight listed, three of them on one street, Springer. That was probably the main drag. I wrote down the addresses.
    Taverns. . . . Nine listed.
    Beer Gardens. . . . No such heading.
    Night Clubs. . . . One, a duplicate listing for one of the taverns.
    That made a total of seventeen places, with the possibility of some duplications. I called a cab, and dressed quickly in sports shirt and lightweight trousers. As we drove out I noted one of the places on my list was just across the road. The neon sign bore the outline of a leaping fish and said: Silver King Inn. Well, I’d stop there on the way back.
    I watched the street signs as we came into town. The main drag was Springer, all right. I got out of the cab in the second block in front of one of the cafés, paid the driver, and went in. There was a call box, but it wasn’t in a booth. The next one was on the other side of the street in the next block. The phone was in a booth near the back, and there was a jukebox not too far from it. When I closed the door the fan came on, but it wasn’t the one. It made no noise at all. I dropped in a dime,