and said sourly, “Oh, stuff it, for God’s sake. Duty is always a cover-up for something else. People like you appall me. They’re always asking to be shot or stabbed by less friendly souls.”
“Are you the less friendly type?”
“Not exactly. I haven’t shot anyone yet.”
She caught her breath sharply, color ebbed from her face and her lips thinned out. Morgan wondered what he had said that had inspired such a reaction in her. Before he could ask, her expression was again coolly passive. She touched a lighter to two cigarettes and handed one to him. He inhaled deeply, feeling a little dizzy as he blew out the smoke.
He asked her curiously, “Do you make a practice of taking in drunken bums this way?”
“You don’t impress me as—as—”
“A bum?” He smiled. “We come in all shapes and sizes. Bums don’t go around any more in cast-off clothes and patched pockets. There’s my kind, you see. When we’re in the chips we patronize the most exclusive shops, live in apartments built around kidney-shaped swimming pools, drive foreign sports cars, lunch at Romanoff’s and dine at the Beverly-Hilton. But we’re still bums. Because there’s always that black day of reckoning when a check doesn’t arrive when you think it should and your credit runs out and you try to ignore it all and hide in a bottle and you always wind up in the same place, the drunk tank. That’s when the tramp that is always in our nature comes out and I find myself precisely right here.”
Irene Wilson looked at him with interest. “You’re unusually frank about your level in life. But are you sure you aren’t ribbing me about yourself?”
“God, no! I only needle stupid, helpless people. You look as if you could fight back.”
She smiled and said, “Perhaps.” She poured him another glass of milk from a chilled pitcher on the table. “But this level of yours—I don’t quite understand it. You must have some sort of skill, or trade?”
Morgan debated whether or not to tell her the truth. He saw his suitcase and portable typewriter on the floor near the dressing room. He assumed that the pawn tickets had been found in his pockets. Probably the butler had redeemed his stuff. Apparently, though, the suitcase had not been opened and his hostess had no inkling of his identity. Maybe it would be better to leave it that way. Quite often, with strangers, he would create entirely new lives for himself, lives with exotic backgrounds—test pilot, deep sea-diver, smuggler, bookie, or, one of his favorites, long-term criminal just out of prison and now determined to go straight. He dominated his audience, he played upon their sympathies, he stretched credulity to the breaking point. He had a wonderful time doing it and he always learned something that added grist to his mill. He had such a tremendous fund of spotty knowledge in so many fields that he never failed to make himself convincing. But he decided, on this occasion, to tell the truth. He was too weak and exhausted to play games for any length of time.
So he said, “My name is Morgan O’Keefe. Does that mean anything to you?”
She frowned and thought for a moment “No-o-o, I can’t say that it does. I saw M. J. O’Keefe on your pawn tickets, but it didn’t mean anything to me. Should it?”
“Not necessarily. If it meant something to everybody I asked I’d be famous and I wouldn’t be here accepting your charity. I’m a writer, you see. I write dreary little books about dreary little people that sell in the dreary hundreds instead of the thousands. My publishers should have stopped printing my stuff years ago—God knows they barely break even—but they keep on with me in the wildly insane hope that some day I may click.”
“If you could mention a few titles—”
“Forget it. You wouldn’t know my stuff. You belong to some book-of-the-month club and a local rental library and whenever you buy anything else you consult the bestseller lists. You won’t find Morgan O’Keefe in that company.”
She was slightly annoyed, principally because he was right. “Well, after all, I do try to read the best.”
“Of course you do. So, naturally, you haven’t read anything of mine.”
She stared at him and then burst out laughing. She stopped suddenly, obviously startled by her own outburst. Morgan wondered about it. Mrs. Wilson was evidently a woman who did not laugh easily, or often.
“Is that what you were doing down south, writing?”
“How did you know where I came from?”
“You told me when I first met you.”
“Oh.” He thought of what he had been doing down south and looked as if he might be sick. “Well,” he said, “the answer to that is yes and no. I wasn’t writing for the movies, if that’s what you’re thinking. I wanted to. I beat my brains out trying to get in, but they didn’t want me. I had exactly one chance all the years I was there. My Hollywood agent got me a deal with MGM at seven-fifty a week and an office in writers’ row. I thought I was set. Then the powers-that-be gave me some other author’s book to adapt for the screen. That was okay, too, except for one thing. The story was about the war and the main character was an officer who was a goddam lily-white hero.” He shook his head, clenched his fists until the knuckles were white, and closed his eyes.
Mrs. Wilson said curiously, “What was wrong with that?”
He kept his eyes closed. “It was the worst thing they could have handed me. I wound up in fifty-two in an army psycho ward, where I damned well belonged. I despise anyone in uniform and anything even remotely suggesting Army makes me deathly ill. I tried, but I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t even force myself to read halfway through the book. So, naturally, I got drunk and I stayed that way. That ended my association with MGM, or any other studio.”
She said simply, “I’m sorry.”
He clasped his thin arms about his knees and looked away from her toward the sun streaming in through the windows. Mrs. Wilson was watching him closely. Her curiosity had given way to enthralled attention and she wanted something more of the man than simply a fragmentary picture. She wanted something she could use at the cocktail party that night.
“I don’t really mean to pry,” she said, “but is that why you left the south, when you lost that job? If I’m getting too personal—”
He looked back at her with a twisted smile. “Of course you’re prying and you’re getting too personal, but I have to repay you somehow or other. Don’t I? No, that is not why I left the south. Would you really like to know why I left?”
“Well—”
“I’ll tell you. I suppose you’ve guessed, or the doctor must have told you, that I’m an alcoholic. When something bothers me too much I go for the bottle. But I don’t drink like ordinary people. I drink to drown myself. I go on and on, day after day. I start with the best and when I run out of money I pawn everything the hock shops will take and switch to cheap sherry and muscatel and keep going until I finally drop from sheer exhaustion and wind up in a drunk tank and sometimes the county hospital. In Los Angeles I made the tank nine times. Nine times in three years.”
She dropped a solicitous hand to his arm, her dark eyes brimming with compassion. “Please. If you don’t care—”
“Hell,” he laughed, “I don’t mind. Maybe I even get some sort of perverse pleasure out of my little
