“Thanks,” I said.

“Fine time to be getting up.” They should have paid her extra for the way her voice sounded on the phone. “Thanks for what?”

“For saying hello on the mirror. I just called to return it.”

“You already did.”

“What, talking in my sleep?”

“You said hello this morning, idiot. Most of my men don’t forget such things.”

“Shucks,” I said. “That.”

“Ummm, that.” She was laughing. “You going to the office?”

I was taking a cigarette, holding the phone wedged against my neck. “Couple hours,” I said. I shook out the match and leaned across to drop it into the ashtray on the telephone table. That was when I noticed it.

“Bye, Harry.”

I did not answer her. I was staring at the tray.

“Harry?”

“Here,” I said.

It must have gotten into my voice. “Harry, is anything wrong?”

I kept looking at it. “No,” I told her. “Just thinking about something. I’ll see you tonight, Cath.”

She hung up. I let the phone dangle in my hand for a minute and then I put it back. The ashtray was one of those big ceramic modern things you could have served chops in. There were ten or a dozen butts in it. Three or four had Cathy’s lipstick on them.

I remembered it clearly. The tray had been loaded when I’d been packing to catch the plane three days before. Tidy Harry had picked it up and carried it to the trash basket in the John and dumped it.

Cathy did not smoke much. A pack of short-size Kents lasted her close to a week and frequently she would go another three or four days without buying any, chiseling a few of my Camels. The butts with the lipstick stains in the tray were Kents. The other seven or eight were Pall Malls.

I was sitting there and seeing them, trying not to think what I was thinking. Try that sometime, especially when you’re in the trade.

I got out of bed and picked up the thing and dumped it. I got dressed and heated up the coffee she’d left and toyed with a cup. I picked up the phone three or four times to dial her office number. Each time I stared at the receiver and then put it back.

It was just somebody who had dropped in. An old friend. Yes, old. So old he’d been too weak to sit on a chair and had had to lie down on the bed.

No. Cathy had brought the tray out into the living room, put it back without emptying it.

Cathy.

It was no good. I went up to the client’s office on Park Avenue and delivered the money and collected what was due on my fee. I walked up three blocks to the bank on the 47th Street corner and deposited the check. It was a bright summer day and there were a lot of women on the streets. All of them were very smart-looking and very chic and not one of them had that quality of being alive that Cathy managed even when she was shaving her legs.

Mrs. Harry Fannin.

I dialed her at four o’clock from the office. She got on and I told her I had rotten news. There was a rush deal and I’d have to be away again for two or three days. Cleveland, I said. I was making a flight in forty minutes.

“Oh, Harry—”

“I’m sorry. Just came up. I’m in a hurry, Cath.”

“Harry?”

“Yeah?”

“Harry, you’ve been so strange on the phone today. So kind of — of distant.”

“Cath, look, I’ve got to scram.”

“All right, Harry.”

“See you, huh?”

“Bye—”

I hung up. She’d sounded forlorn as hell. The first guy who came along with a tin cup, I was going to buy every pair of shoelaces he had.

I went out and took a cab down Fifth Avenue to the nearest You-Drive-It and I rented a two-year-old Ford sedan. I drove over to Third Avenue and stopped at one of the cheap saloons the fags hadn’t decided was quaint yet and I had three bourbons while watching the clock. At 5:151 left and swung around to Lexington and went back up town. It had started to drizzle. I pulled in at 68th at exactly 5:28 and parked near the end of the block, away from the direction in which she would come home. Four minutes later I saw her make the corner on the double, running with a newspaper over her head. She went inside. I sat there.

I chewed cigarettes, thinking how the one kind of job a legitimate P.I. won’t take are those cheap divorce things where you climb through transoms with a fresh load of Sylvania 25’s in your flashholder. I could make a couple thousand more a year if I was hard up enough to do that. I could have probably even afforded an electric lathe or a power saw, so that my wife would have had a hobby when I was out nights.

The rain stopped in an hour. No one had gone in or out of the building who I didn’t know. There are only four apartments in it. Collins, the architect on the top floor, went in about ten minutes after Cathy. Jojo Pringle came out a little after six. He’s a jazz clarinetist and a hophead and I knew he’d be on his way for a light brunch. Three or four patients went into Dr. Salter’s private entrance on the ground floor.

I began to dislike myself around seven. By eight o’clock the feeling had become one of contempt. I had planned to park there for three days if I had to, but now I told myself I’d give it one more hour and then if I had any sense I’d go upstairs and apologize.

She came out at 8:33.

She had changed out of her office clothes. She was wearing a tight, candy-striped summer skirt and a white blouse. She was great on white blouses. Her hair glinted under the street lamp.

She began walking away from me, going with the one-way traffic and glancing over her shoulder. I started the engine in the Ford when I spotted the empty cruiser cab in the mirror. It picked her up and went a block and then cut downtown on Second.

Go to a movie, I said. Do that, Cathy. Tell the driver to head over to midtown.

Get rich wishing. The cab went all the way down to 14th before it turned. It went across to Seventh Avenue and then south again into the Village. It stopped at Sheridan Square. The light was green and I had to pass it. I double parked in front of a liquor store, using the mirror while she paid and got out. A panel truck pulled away a little up the block. I waited until she turned a corner and then I eased the Ford into the gap.

There was a small off-Broadway theater over a few blocks. Maybe she was going there. Maybe she was going to Hobo-ken or Las Vegas or Guam, since they were all in that general direction.

The joint was called Angelino’s.

It was one of those seedy basement places some landlord had had to turn into a bar twenty years before because no one would pay United States currency to live in it. I knew the kind of crowd it would get. Guys with a notion they wanted to be artists who didn’t shave because they thought you were halfway there if you looked the part. Girls in grimy sweat shirts with the complete poems of Dylan Thomas under their arms when what they needed were cartons of Rinso. Sophisticated young uptown ladies slumming with their toothbrushes in their pocketbooks.

I supposed she’d known the place from when she’d lived in the Village before we were married. I went past the doorway once and saw her standing in the crush at the bar. If she was meeting any one guy in particular he wasn’t doing any downhill schuss to get there.

I went back and got the Ford and parked it a few doors down from the entrance. I walked down the opposite side of the street to the liquor store and picked up a pint of bourbon. When I came back past the doorway this time three or four of the guys near her were working on it. It was all palsy enough so that she was laughing about something. I went back to the car and opened the pint.

People drifted in and out or along the street. So did their conversation, and it was too muggy to roll up the window:

“—Look, if you can call my mother Jocasta, and me narcissistic—”

“—Talk about paranoia—”

“—The really accomplished Mexican painters, like Orozco and Tamayo—”