THE DETECTIVE
more boys came up from the dining room and visited that depot;
moreover, they all made trips down to reload. Acker stayed where
he was, stupefied, and tried to estimate his loss if such a quantity of
provisions was heisted every day. But the question, the paramount
inquiry, was:
Where
did it come from?
When
did it? And
how?
He looked at his watch; it read eleven.
Suddenly he was aware of a faint, far-off sound of revelry in
the night.
It
came to
him
not from any place below, and not
exactly from the stairway above-the firedoor had been banged
shut up there-but out of the air, as it were, floating down from
the blurred multitudes of stars he could distinguish high in the
dark universe out of the fire-escape door open behind
him:
a kind
of muzzy singing over bursts of loud talk, and hoots and howls and
yelps of laughter mixed up with the intermittent strains of music
that you heard when a radio abandoned in some room or other
played aimlessly shrill and unheeded by itself. He listened for a
minute, confounded by the noise of this unplaceable party: it was
like the mockery of a dream that you were in heaven, among the
luminous, milky hosts of the skies, and hearing the happiness all
about you, and being unable to see anything at all. Recovering his
attention, he decided he had delayed much too long, and attempted
to rise to an officially important position. But his legs failed
him,
and he dropped; the left one was entirely numb, the right tingled
like an alarm clock. He sat there stretching them and cursing them
under
his
thoughts and massaging them until they grew quiet,
meanwhile feeling a peculiarly acrid and constricted desperation
of mood welling up in him out of his stomach, or his chest-he
wasn't sure which.
When he could get up, he marched directly to the linen closet.
It was not even locked: already a sign of fundamental disorder.
Mrs. Jewett would have bitten her bloodless lip to come on this!
He walked in and pulled the cord. The light revealed nothing un–
usual: the shelves held clean linen, all quite neatly stacked and
ticketed; the floor was swept; the empty water pitchers and glasses,
and things like the hotel's thin cakes of Ivory and the girls' mops
and brooms and dustcloths and so forth-everything tidy. His
questing eyes flickered, then found his desire; almost hidden in a
recess in the back comer, the unpainted little door to the dumb-
