Double

16: “Wolf”

I ate supper in the hotel coffee shop and then went up to my room and tried to call Kerry. No answer. So then I tried to call Eberhardt. No answer. So then I tried to call Charley Valdene, and he wasn’t home either. Feeling lonely and unwanted, I switched on the television and found something to watch — a 1943 film labeled an “Inner Sanctum Mystery” and carrying the sedate title of Calling Dr. Death.

The movie was pretty awful, but I managed to stick with it for close to an hour. Until J. Carroll Naish, playing a cop, said to Lon Chaney, Jr., playing a neurologist in one of the all-time great pieces of miscasting, “You’ve gone beyond life, doctor — into the brain!” At which point I got up and shut the thing off.

Time to go beyond the brain, I thought, into something even greater and more desirable: the realm of sleep.

I went to bed.