Deadline at Dawn

He told himself: If he’s stayed in one of these places this long after, at all, then he’ll be by himself, aloof, withdrawn. A person doesn’t enter a bar, after killing someone, looking for sociability. A person enters a bar, after such a thing, to steady his nerves. Look for someone by himself, then, withdrawn, noncommunicative, separate from the rest of the customers both in stance and attitude.

That was one short-cut. The first and foremost of them all.

He came upon this place, and he cased it quickly, first from the outside, without entering at all. It was small enough to stand for that without danger of omission of any pertinent detail. It was a store, an enclave, the width of half the usual shopfront. Its bar, instead of being something that belonged over with one side of it, bisected it mathematically down the middle. The aisle of clearance left on the outside, for the customers, was no wider than that left on the inside for the barman. Moreover, it had none of the usual adjunct of tables sheltered within booths or partitions, difficult to survey from out front where he was. He could look straight down the bartop, in central diminishing perspective, from the frontal window. And this is what he saw:

There were eight people paid out along it. They broke into about three groups, each self-contained, oblivious of the others, but he had to look close to tell where the divisions came in. Physical distance had nothing to do with it; they all stretched away from him in an unbroken line. It was the turn of the shoulders that told him. The limits of each group were marked by a shoulder turned obliquely to those next in line beyond. They were like enclosing parentheses, those shoulders. In other words, the end men in each group were not postured straight forward, they turned inward toward their own clique. The groupings broke thus: first three, then a turned shoulder, then three again, then another turned shoulder, then finally two, standing vis-à-vis.

No singles, no solitary drinkers there. He was about to pass on his way, then suddenly he looked again, something caught his eye, held him fast out there. His eye had just run down the bartop, automatically checking the number of glasses against the number of people, and found something awry, out of true.

There were nine glasses, there were eight people. There was one more glass than there was a person to drink from it.

He counted both over again, to make sure. It was easy to tabulate the people; it was not so easy to tabulate the glasses, for there were hands continually dropping in and out amidst them, impeding his clearness of view.

Again they came out nine, even after he’d checked them for chaser-glasses, which would have been counted two to a drinker. There weren’t any of those. Everyone in the place happened to be drinking beer at the moment.

Nor was the extra glass a discard. It stood, not before anyone, but by itself, at the far end, with only empty space before it where its user should have been.

It was what he had been looking for: the aloof, solitary, removed symbol. Only it was not a person, it was an inanimate glass mug.

The first hieroglyph.

He went in.

He skirted all the others, he went down by the far end, where it was, where all the eloquent empty space was. There was a gap of long yards there, between the last drinker and the wall. He moved in there, not directly in front of it, but very close to it.

He looked at it, and it paid off twice. Just a beer mug and yet it paid off by his very looking at it.

They had handles, as that type of receptacle always does; they were octagonal in shape, thick and bulky, with enormously indented bottoms, to the profit of the purveyors, and they had handles. The handles of all the others were in line, they pointed one way, away from the door, inward toward the back of the shop. The handle of this one and this one alone was in reverse, it pointed outward toward the street.

The second hieroglyph.

He bought a beer himself, to draw the barman to him, to lubricate the questions he was about to ask. The chase had suddenly come to a head again; landed in one spot, if only briefly, like the tormenting, buzzing, circling gadfly it was.

He said to the barman, “Whose is this?”

The barman said, “Fellow that just went back there a minute.”

So he was still in the place. The quantity of liquid still in it, the fact that it was allowed to stand there undisturbed, had already told him that.

He didn’t have much time; he slashed straight through to the next question, letting his informant like it or not as he chose. “What color suit’d he have on?”

“Brown,” the barman said reservedly. The barman gave him a look. The barman didn’t like it, but — “brown,” the barman said.

The third hieroglyph. All at one time, all in one place, all out of a crass beer mug. Drinking isolated in a crowd, left-handed, wearing a brown suit.

He asked a third question. “How long has he been in here, ’d you notice?”