“Such a long time you took,” she said.
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“I’d almost decided to invite up a sub from the bar.”
“Roscoe?”
“Don’t sneer at Roscoe. Roscoe I love.”
“I’m not sneering at him. I love the old devil as much as you do.”
“Did you get Avery delivered all right?”
“Safe and sound. He’s going to Miami tomorrow.”
“Really? And you feeling sorry for him? When are we going to Miami, Ed?”
“Sometime. We could go tomorrow if we wanted to. With Avery. He asked us.”
“He must have been drunk!”
“He was drunk, all right, but I think he actually meant it. He was funny. All screwed up inside, I mean. He kept saying things it wasn’t like him to say.”
“What things?”
“Oh, crazy stuff. About why he never married and all. About not liking women. About how his mother slept with a Mexican musician once.”
“Maybe he has a psychosis or neurosis or something.”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“His mother, you say? Really with a Mexican musician?”
“That’s what he said.”
“I wonder how a Mexican musician would be.”
“You wouldn’t like it.”
“Why? What makes you so sure?”
“Because you’ve been spoiled.”
“Well, such conceit! Are you having trouble with that shoestring?”
“Don’t get impatient, darling.”
“Maybe we should go to Mexico instead of Miami. Or maybe I could run down and back by myself while you’re getting that damn shoelace untied.”
“I’m stalling deliberately. You’re cute when you’re eager.”
“I’m perfectly calm.” She tossed her head. “There’s a martini left. Would you care for it?”
“No. I had a couple of bourbons at the bar and another one at Avery’s.”
“In that case, I’ll just drink it myself.”
But there wasn’t time, as it turned out, for the last martini. And for the next part of the evening, all romantic propaganda to the contrary notwithstanding, there was no better place anywhere — not in Miami, not in Mexico, not anywhere on earth.
Chapter II
Section 1
The snow came down fiercely over the northern part of the state, and in Midland City, the state’s metropolis, it started falling shortly after dark and continued most of the night. The temperature fell slowly but steadily all that time. Between eight and midnight, the traffic squad of the city police had reports of twenty-three minor accidents, and an alcoholic who was hardly aware of the snow, or of anything else, lay down in a doorway on the lower south side and was found dead in the morning.
In the living room of a small apartment not far from the place where the alcoholic was dying, a young woman named Lisa Sheridan stood at a window and looked down into the narrow street below, and because she was lonely and depressed and felt that there was no security on earth, she was thinking of things that had happened to her in the past, not because there was anything particularly comforting in these things but simply because they were over and done with and not presently threatening. Many of the things that had happened to her were not really so much different, in fact, from the things that had happened to many other girls, but they had had vastly different effects and had come, or were coming, to vastly different ends, and she wondered why this should be so. It was a problem she was in no way equipped to solve, and it was not so much in the expectation of coming to a solution as for the simple relief she found in keeping her mind busy that she concerned herself with it at all.
Behind her in the room, sitting sprawled in an overstaffed chair with her legs spread out in front of her and a cigarette hanging from her lips, was the woman who shared the apartment. Her name was Bella Cassidy, and she had lived most of her twenty-nine years in overt conformity with one world and in covert allegiance to another. She had black hair cut short and rather shaggy, and her face was thin and swarthy with long, narrow eyes and a thin-lipped mouth. There was a natural grace in her slender body, a kind of suggested muscular toughness that was not actually evident in weight or bulges, and there was now, besides that, a quality of wariness in her whole attitude that was oddly inconsistent with her posture. Without touching the cigarette with her fingers, she drew a cloud of smoke into her lungs and released it. Through the smoke, she stared at the back of the girl at the window.
“For God’s sake, sit down,” she said. “It wears me out to watch you.”
The imperative nature of her words did not affect the timber of the voice in which they were spoken. She sounded as if, in spite of what she said, it really made no difference whatever to her if Lisa sat down or not. Without turning, Lisa said, “I don’t want to sit down.”
“All right. Stand up, then. Be as childish as you like.”
“I’m not being childish.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake! Can’t you do anything but make denials? Denying a thing doesn’t alter the truth, you know. The truth is, you’ve decided that everything is over between us, that I’ve spoiled everything, and nothing I can say will make any difference.”
“How do you expect me to feel?”
“I expect you to be sensible, but I see that you won’t.” Lisa turned and stood with her back to the window, looking at Bella with eyes that betrayed her depression and fright. She was somewhat under average height, eyen for a woman, but her body was so slim and straight that she did not seem to be. Her hair was soft and fine and a very pale gold, almost silver, parted in the middle and drawn back behind her ears into a knot. There was about her, in her face and the rest of her, an effect of cold delicacy that approached frailty, and she was, in fact, within the limits imposed by the coldness and fragility, very lovely. Pale gold against the dark glass, thought Bella, and the words came into her mind simultaneously with a kind-of catch in her heart that was for a moment ecstatic pain, and for the duration of the moment she regretted the choice she had made and the line of action she was now following.
“Is it sensible to blackmail my own family?” Lisa said.
“Why not? They’re wealthy and can afford it, and it’s certainly the only way you’re ever going to get anything out of them.”
“I don’t want anything from them. It’s you who wants it.”
“I want it for both of us. I told you that. It’s entirely unnecessary for you to make an issue of it.”
“But when it comes to a choice between me and the money, you choose the money.”
“That’s your fault. There is no necessity, as I said, to make a choice at all. Since you’re determined that I must, however, it has now become a matter of principle. I don’t choose to be a fool just because you’re one.”
It was not the first time Lisa had been called a fool. Another girl had called her that once, but it had been a long time ago, and it was something she did not now want to remember or to think about.
“Perhaps I’m a fool,” she said, “and perhaps I am many things worse, but at least I’m not a blackmailer.”
Bella shrugged and sucked her cigarette. “If it makes you feel better to call me names, go ahead.”
“It doesn’t make me feel better. Nothing in the world will ever make me feel better again. I’m sick and frightened, and I wish I had never met you.”