Page:Arthur Stringer - The Door of Dread.djvu/198



ADIE WIMPEL nursed no great love for head waiters. She had, in the past, too often dashed with these mysterious embodiments of interlocking authority and subserviency. Yet after her interview with the head waiter of the Alsatia, the same being both brief and persuasive, she sat in the pink-lighted room of serried tables and near-onyx and plate mirrors, sedately sipping her second cup of black coffee.

She would have much preferred a gin rickey. But seeing matters of moment before her, she decided to keep a clear head and a cool hand. For, over the rim of her cup as she drank, she could distinctly see at a table not more than the toss of an oyster cracker from her, a rotund and somewhat familiar figure in full evening dress.

About this rubicund figure, seated in solitary state at his small rose-shaded table, there was still something both inalienably blithe and disarmingly inconsequential. Had the serviette tucked up under his many-terraced chin been red instead of white he 186