“Ralph!” he called. “I’m back!” He went up to Ralph’s room. The old man was propped up in bed. There were newspapers on the floor and in his lap, but he did not seem to have been reading them. The crease between his eyebrows was deeper, his nasal folds were wrinkled, the edges of his mouth turned down. Like an unhappy old monkey, dyspeptic, bewildered, he turned his wide-open eyes to Clinton.

“How’d you do? The car handle all right?”

“Yeah, it handled good. You want some food?”

“Naw, I had baloney, beer. —You left her there okay, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“Her bein’ there is the right thing.”

“Sure it is.”

The old man looked at the foot of the bed.

“He was here.”

“Berry-berry? He was here?”

“Yeah,” Ralph said. “He left, maybe an hour ago.” The old man studied his wrist, and then he began to rub it with his thumb, trying to form a noodle.

Clinton said, “What’d he have to say?”

“Oh, he—uh—needs some money.”

“I mean, what’d he say about—what happened?”

The old man seemed ashamed. He mumbled evasively: “He didn’t have much to say. He—uh, said it was a terrible thing, just terrible.”

Neither Ralph nor Clinton could look at each other. Ralph made a thorough study of his entire left arm. Clinton looked at the bedside stand, the telephone, the medicine bottles, Annabel’s ship’s-wheel lamp, the ash tray.

“Where is he?” Clinton said.

“I don’t know.”

“I guess he’ll go out and maybe get drunk, huh?”

Ralph shrugged. “I suppose. I suppose that’s what anybody’d do. Thing like this, you know, it’s a shock, it’s a terrible thing. If Echo O’Brien was an ordinary girl, it’d been bad enough. But she was a queen, for godsake.”

Clinton nodded. “Does he figure to go up with us? Tuesday?”

“I don’t know about that. Doesn’t look like he’ll be able to make it. He wants some money.”

“From you?”

“Yeah, that’s right.”

“To go away?”

Ralph made no direct answer to this question. He looked straight ahead for a moment. His face bore the blank and senseless expression of a person who imagines himself alone. When finally he spoke, there seemed to be no wind supporting his voice: “He wasn’t sure he’d be able to make the funeral.”

Now it happened that at this moment Clinton’s eye went to the bottom shelf of the bedside stand and came to rest on a copy of the Cleveland Telephone Directory. This thick book held his full attention for a long time; even as he spoke brief, mechanical phrases to Ralph, his mind was caught and held by it.

Ralph said, “He was talking something about he wanted money. I told him we’d look into that—at another time. But I let him have twenty. You think I did right?”

“I guess.” Clinton studied the image of Mercury on the cover of the directory, the glistening body, the winged helmet, the feathered feet, the hand held high, pointing, beckoning. “Ralph, I want to ask you a favor. Can I borrow the car? For another while?”