I’m trying to reach my wife on a very urgent matter. Could you tell me how long ago she checked out?”

“Yes, sir. It was shortly before seven this evening.”

“Do you know whether she received a long-distance call? Or made one?”

“Hmmm—I think there was a call for her from Carthage, Alabama, but she didn’t get it—”

“How’s that?” I interrupted.

“It was before she came in. Around five-thirty.”

“Was there any message, or a number to call back?”

“No, sir. There was no information at all, so we didn’t make out a slip on it. I just happened to remember it because Mrs. Warren asked when she came in if there’d been any calls, and I checked with the board and told her about it. She made no calls herself, though; we have no toll charges on the bill.”

“Wait—you mean besides the one at 1:30 this afternoon?”

“No. There were none at all, Mr. Warren.”

I was gripping the receiver so hard my fingers hurt, and I had to restrain an impulse to shout. “You’d better check again if your information’s no better than that. She called me at 1:30.”

“It must have been from outside the hotel, sir. We always clear with the switchboard when making up the bill, especially on unscheduled checkouts, and we have no record of it.”

“I’m still lying here in bed…” Well, she hadn’t said whose. I traced a thoughtful doodle along the table top with my forefinger, said, “Thank you very much,” and dropped the receiver back on the cradle. As I was turning away I suddenly remembered the three or four trumpet notes I’d heard in the background when she was talking to me, and it struck me now there’d been something oddly familiar about them. God, had she been on a military reservation? No—I’d spent a good part of my life being ordered by buglers in the Army and in military schools when I was a boy, and even with my tin ear I could recognize any of the calls after the first few notes. It was something else. It must have been just music, which to me was always a more or less unintelligible jumble of sounds. I cursed. What difference did it make?

I went out to the kitchen, poured another big slug of bourbon—straight this time—and stood by the table looking down at the opened gift box containing the cigarette lighter. The whiskey helped, but it was still sickening as I began to probe through the mess with a stick, trying to classify the things that crawled out of it. Some were facts, some were assumptions, and some were mere guesses, but they all oozed off in the same direction. If the girl had been right about Roberts, you could at least assume she might be right about the rest of it. You don’t think he was the only one, do you? And it was a cinch. It wasn’t Roberts who tried to get her at the hotel in New Orleans. He was already dead.

I suddenly remembered trying to get her last night, with no success. Maybe the story about being out on Bourbon Street with the Dickinsons was as big a lie as the rest of it. And why had she checked out of the hotel so abruptly? According to the clerk, she still hadn’t come in at five-thirty, but she was checked out and gone before seven, while she’d told me she was going to stay till Sunday. She hadn’t received any phone call from here; she’d merely asked if there had been one, and when she learned there had, she’d packed and taken off.

I noticed again the letter from the broker’s office sticking out from under the box the lighter had come in, and without quite knowing why, I slipped it out, tore open the envelope, and then stared uncomprehendingly at the typed verification form it contained. She had liquidated the account three days ago.