She cut him short contemptuously: “You’re well advised not to ask questions, James. I could ask questions, too, about Francis, for instance. Only, I know the answers.”

He fell silent for a time. I could hear one of them breathing. Finally, he sighed. “Well, we’re getting nowhere. What do you want?”

“I’ll tell you what I want. Half of everything you have, and that includes half of this property now.”

“Now! Mother’s death has been exceedingly convenient for you, hasn’t it? If I didn’t know you, Maude, I’d believe that you killed Mother yourself.”

“I won’t pretend I’m sorry that it happened. As soon as this unpleasantness is over with, and you’ve agreed to a settlement, I’m going to court.”

“I’ll make a settlement,” he said thinly. “You’ve waited long enough for your share of the property. Now you can have it.”

“And Cathy,” she insisted. “Don’t forget Cathy.”

“I have not forgotten her. Cathy is staying with me.”

“So she can live à trois with you and Francis? I think not.”

He spoke with great effort: “Francis doesn’t enter into the picture.”

“Francis or someone like him. I know your penchant, James.”

“No.” The word exploded from his lips. “Cathy is all I want.”

“I know what you want. You want a healthy life so you can twine around it like a vine. You tried it with me, but I tore you loose, and you shan’t twist yourself around Cathy. I’m moving out of here, and taking her with me.”

“No. No.” The second word trailed off in a painful whimper. “You mustn’t leave me alone.”

“You have your friends,” she said with irony.

“Don’t leave me, Maude. I’m afraid to be left alone. I need you both, much more than you believe.” His voice was quite unmanned, a hysterical boy’s.

“You’ve neglected me for fifteen years,” she said. “When I’ve finally got my chance to go, you insist I have to stay.”

“You must stay. It’s your duty to stay with me. I can’t be left alone.”

“Be a man,” she said. “I can’t have any feeling for a whining jellyfish.”

“You used to love me—”

“Did I?”

“You wanted to be my wife and look after me.”

“That was a long time ago. I can’t remember.”

I heard breath drawn in, feet moving quickly on the floor. “Whore!” he cried in a harsh choking voice. “You’re a horrible cold woman, and I hate you.”

“It chills a woman off,” she said clearly and firmly, “being married to a fairy.”

“Horrible. Woman.” The caesura between the words was marked by a blow on flesh. Then something bony, his knees perhaps, bumped unevenly on the floor. “Forgive me,” he said, “forgive me.”

“You struck me.” Her voice was blank with shock. “You hurt me.”

“I didn’t mean it. Forgive me. I love you, Maude. Please stay with me.” A retching sob tore through his babbling and lengthened rhythmically. For a long time there was nothing but the sound of the man’s crying.

Then she began to comfort him, in a gentle lulling voice. “Be quiet, Jimmie. Dear Jimmie. I’ll stay with you. We’ll have a good life yet, won’t we, my dear?”

I staggered slightly when I got to my feet. I felt as if I’d been listening in on a microphone built into the walls of hell. I passed the closed door of the sitting-room without breaking my stride, and went out onto the lawn. The sky was black and moving. Long gray clouds streamed across the mountains to the sea, flowing like a river over the jagged edge of the world.

I was halfway across the lawn to the drive when I remembered that my car was parked on the street in Nopal Valley. I went around to the back of the house and found the kitchen empty except for the housekeeper. Mrs. Strang was an elderly woman with a long, soft face and fading hair. She was cooking something in a saucepan on the stove.

She jumped sideways at the sound of my footsteps. “Heavens! You frightened me.”

“I’m sorry. I’m Archer, a friend of Mrs. Slocum’s.”

“Oh yes, you phoned, I remember.” Her lips were trembling and blue.

I said: “Is Cathy all right?”

“Yes, she’s all right. I’m making her some hot milk to put her to sleep. The poor child needs her rest after all these terrible things happening.”

In a way I felt responsible for Cathy, if only because there was nobody else to feel responsible. Her parents were completely involved in their private war, negotiating their little armistice. Probably it had always been like that.

“You’ll take good care of Cathy?” I said to Mrs. Strang.

She answered me with pride: “I always have, Mr. Archer. She’s very well worth it, you know. Some of her teachers think she is a genius.”

“This place is lousy with geniuses, isn’t it?”

I left before I got into an argument. From the kitchen door, I saw a white flash splatter the darkness below the garages like a brushful of whitewash. They were still taking pictures around the pool.

Knudson was there with three members of his department, directing a series of measurements. Near them the body lay under a blanket, waiting patiently to be taken away. The underwater lights of the pool were on, so that the water was a pale emerald depth with a luminous and restless surface filming it.

When he saw me Knudson moved away from his group and lifted his chin at an angle. When I was near enough to hear his low voice: “What did she say? Co-operate with us?”

“I didn’t see her. She was locked in the room with her husband.”

His nostrils flared in a private nasal sneer, not intended for me. “I’ve got our radio cars out looking for Reavis. You could be a help, since you know him to see.”

“It’s a little off my beat, isn’t it?”

“You be the judge of that.” His shoulders rose and fell in a muscular slow-motion shrug. “It seems to me there’s a certain responsibility—?”

“Maybe so. Can you get me a lift into town? Not with Franks.”

“Sure.” He turned to the photographer, who was kneeling by the body. “Just about finished, Winowsky?”

“Yeah.” He threw back the blanket. “A couple more shots of the stiff. I want to do her justice, my professional honor demands it.”

“You take Mr. Archer into town with you.”

“Yeah.”

He stood over the body in a crouching position and flashed the bulb attached to the top of his camera. The white magnesium light drew the dead face from the shadows and projected it against the night. The freckles grew like acne on the lime-white skin. Bulbous and white, like deepsea life, the foam bulged from the nostrils and gaping mouth. The open green eyes gazed up in blank amazement at the dark sky moving between the darker mountains.

“Once more,” the photographer said, and stepped across the body. “Now watch the birdie.”

The white light flashed again on the unmoving face.

Chapter 9

The building was pink stucco, big and new and ugly. It had a side entrance with “Romp Room” lettered above it in red neon. The wall was blind except for the door and a couple of round screened ventilators. I could hear the noise of the romping from the outside: the double-time beat of a band, the shuffling of many feet. When I pulled the heavy door open, the noise blasted my ears.

Most of it came from the platform at the rear end of the room, where a group of young men in white flannels were maltreating a piano, a guitar, a trombone, a trumpet, drums. The piano tinkled and boomed, the trombone brayed, the trumpet squawked and screeched. The guitar bit chunks from the chromatic scale and spat them out in rapid fire without chewing them. The drummer hit everything he had, drums, traps, cymbals, stamped on the floor, beat the rungs of his chair, banged the chrome rod that supported the microphone. The Furious Five, it said on his biggest drum.

The rest of the noise came from the booths that lined three walls of the room, and from the dance-floor in the middle where twenty or thirty couples whirled in the smoke. The high titter of drunk and flattered women, the animal sounds of drunk and eager men. Babel with a wild jazz obbligato.