CHAPTER THIRTEENThe Splendid Place
Malcolm flatly refused to say a word until he had been told the story of the afternoon. It staggered him so completely that twice on their walk down to the restaurant—at the finding of Aggie Fitch, and at the fantasia of Sir Arthur Wilson Cribb and the yellow lamp wire—he stopped dead in his tracks. The second time he and Gamadge lost a light.
Gamadge was not pacified by his excuse that he was thinking of that poor kid Ena.
“Ena? Ena? She’s irrelevant. Don’t keep dragging your amours into this.”
They had reached the restaurant that still fed people on Sundays, and there, amid the roar of voices, the clash of falling crockery, the shouts of waiters and the moan of the radio, Malcolm told his own tale:
“When Clayborn came out of the alley he never saw
