He brushed them gently against a hardened coat of whiting, smiled his pleasantest, and left, assisted doorward by what might at one time have been called a sigh.
He paused for a moment in the small foyer, after putting on his hat and coat, and pencilled the Endicotts’ telephone number on one of his cards. He started back to give it to Madame Velasquez.
She wasn’t in the room where he had left her, and the room’s other door stood ajar. He crossed to it softly and looked in. Madame Velasquez—yes, he convinced himself, it was Madame Velasquez—was sitting before a dresser. Her wig was off, and her heavily enamelled face peered into a mirror beneath thin knots of corn-gray hair. As the lonely, weak old voice rose and fell, Lieutenant Valcour caught a word or two of what Madame Velasquez was saying:
“He didn’t know—if I went and told her once, I told her a thousand times—he didn’t know .” There followed a short, dreadful noise that passed as laughter. “But I know—Miramar knows, darling—you little lousy …”
Lieutenant Valcour retreated softly. He left the card lying on a table. He went outside and closed the door. He rang for the elevator and shut his eyes while waiting for it to come up. There were times when they grew a little weary from looking too intimately upon life.
Down in the lobby he used the house telephone and called up the Endicotts’.
“Lieutenant Valcour talking,” he said.
“O’Brian, sir.”
“Everything quiet?”
“Indeed and it is, sir.”