the bartender asked. “Please,” I said. As he mixed me another scotch and soda, he said, “Hope you don’t have far to go tonight. That damned snow doesn’t want to quit. I told the wife I might wind up staying here. We’ve got a cot in the back. Of course she thinks I’m hitting on the two waitresses.” He was sixtyish, balding, and saddled with the kind of smile that would remind younger women of uncles and granddads. I doubted his wife had too much to worry about. The Parrot Cage lounge sat across the street from a new three-story hotel, a hotel that offered suites pretty much like small apartments for travelers who planned to be in the city awhile. I was here because two of the newspapermen I’d called said that, so far as they knew, Greaves was staying at the hotel and doing a lot of his drinking at the Parrot Cage. I knew he had an apartment somewhere in the city but was told that when he wanted to celebrate something, he took a hotel room for a week or two. I’d checked the hotel.
