“'I thought you said it was getting better,” I said.'

“'I honestly thought it was,” he answered me. And the next day, he made the appointment with Houston.'

Who probably told him, Halleck thought, about the college kid with no brain and the old lady with the third set of teeth. And asked if he'd like a short snort of the old brain-squirts.

A week later Rossington had been seeing the best team of dermatologists in New York. They knew immediately what was wrong with him, they said, and a regimen of 'hard-gamma' X rays had followed. The scaly flesh continued to creep and spread. It did not hurt, Rossington told her; there was a faint itching at the borders between his old skin and this horrible new invader, but that was all. The new flesh had absolutely no feeling at all. Smiling the ghastly, shocked smile that was coming to be his only expression, he told her that the other day he had lit a cigarette and crushed it out on his own stomach … slowly. There had been no pain, none at all

She had put her hands up to her ears and screamed at him to stop.

The dermatologists told Cary they had been a bit offcourse. What do you mean? Cary asked. You guys said you knew. You said you were sure. Well, they said, these things happen. Rarely, ha-ha, very rarely, but now we have it licked. All the tests, they said, bore this new conclusion out. A regimen of hipovites – high potency vitamins to those unfamiliar with high-priced doc talk and glandular injections had followed. At the same time this new treatment was getting under way, the first scaly patches had begun to show up on Cary's neck … the underside of his chin … and finally on his face. That was when the dermatologists finally admitted they were stumped. Only for the moment, of course. No such thing is incurable. Modern medicine … dietary regimen … and mumble-mumble … likewise blah-de-dah …

Cary would no longer listen to her if she tried to talk to him about the old Gypsy, she told Halleck; once he had actually raised his hand as if to strike her … and she had seen the first humping and roughening of the skin in the tender webbing between the thumb and forefinger on his right hand.

'Skin cancer!' he shouted at her. 'This is skin cancer, skin cancer, skin cancer! Now will you for Christ's sweet sake shut up about that old wog!'

Of course he was the one who was making at least nominal sense, she was the one who was talking in fourteenth-century absurdities … and yet she knew it had been the doing of the old Gypsy who had stepped out of the crowd at the Raintree flea market and touched Cary's face. She knew it, and in his eyes, even when he raised his hand to her that time, she saw that he knew it too.

He had arranged for a leave of absence with Glenn Petrie, who was shocked to hear his old friend, fellow jurist, and golf partner Cary Rossington had skin cancer.

There had followed two weeks, Leda told Halleck, that she could barely bring herself to remember or speak of. Cary had alternately slept like the dead, sometimes upstairs in their room but just as often in the big overstuffed chair ,in his den or with his head in his arms at the kitchen table. He began to drink heavily every afternoon around four. He would sit in the family room, holding the neck of a J. W. Dant whiskey bottle in one roughening, scaly hand, watching first syndicated comedy shows like Hogan's Heroes and The Beverly Hillbillies, then the local and national news, then syndicated game shows like The Joker's Wild and Family Feud, then three hours of primetime, followed by more news, followed by movies until two or three in the morning. And all the while he drank whiskey like Pepsi-Cola, straight from the bottle.

On some of these nights he would cry. She would come in and observe him weeping while Warner Anderson, imprisoned inside their Sony large-screen TV, cried, 'Let's go to the videotape!' with the enthusiasm of a man inviting all his old girlfriends to go on a cruise to Aruba with him. On still, other nights – mercifully few of them – he would rave like Ahab during the last days of the Pequod, shambling and stumbling through the house with the whiskey bottle held in a hand that was not really a hand anymore, shouting that it was skin cancer, did she hear him, it was fucking skin cancer and he had gotten it from the fucking UV lamp, and he was going to sue the dirty quacks that had done this to him, sue them right down to the motherfucking ground, litigate the bastards until they didn't have so much as a shit-stained pair of skivvies to stand up in. Sometimes when he was in these moods, he broke things.

'I finally realized that he was having these … these fits … on the nights after Mrs Marley came in to clean,' she said dully. 'He'd go up into the attic when she was here, you see. If she'd seen him, it would have been all over town in no time at all. It was the nights after she'd been in and he'd been up there in the dark that he felt most like an outcast, I think. Most like a freak.'

'So he's gone to the Mayo Clinic,' Billy said.

'Yes,' she said, and at last she looked at him. Her face was drunk and horrified. 'What's going to become of him, Billy? What can become of him?'

Billy shook his head. He hadn't the slightest idea. Furthermore, he found he had no more urge to contemplate the question than he'd had to contemplate that famous news photograph of the South Vietnamese general shooting the supposed Vietcong collaborator in the head. In a weird way he couldn't quite understand, this was like that.

'He chartered a private plane to fly to Minnesota, did I tell you that? Because he can't bear to have people look at him. Did I tell you that, Billy?'

Billy shook his head again.

'What's going to become of him?'

'I don't know,' Halleck said, thinking: And just by the way, what's going to become of me, Leda?

'At the end, before he finally gave up and went, both of his hands were claws. His eyes were two . . . two bright little sparks of blue inside these pitted, scaly hollows. His nose . . .' She stood up and wobbled toward him, hitting the corner of the coffee table hard enough with her leg to make it shift – She doesn't feel it now, Halleck thought, but she's going to have one hell of a painful bruise on her calf tomorrow, and if she's lucky she'll wonder where she got it, or how.

She grasped at his hand. Her eyes were great glittering pools of uncomprehending horror. She spoke with a gruesome, breathy confidentiality that prickled the skin of Billy's neck. Her breath was rank with undigested gin.

'He looks like an alligator now,' she said in what was almost an intimate whisper. 'Yes, that's what he looks like, Billy. Like something that just crawled out of a swamp and put on human clothes. It's like he's turning into an alligator, and I was glad he went. Glad. I think if he hadn't gone, I would have gone. Yes. Just packed a bag and … and . . .'

She was leaning closer and closer, and Billy stood up suddenly, unable to stand any more of this. Leda Rossington rocked back on her heels and Halleck just barely managed to catch her by the shoulders … he had also drunk too much, it seemed. If he had missed her, she might very well have brained herself on the same glass-topped, brass-bound coffee table (Trifles, $587 plus mailing) on which she had struck her leg … only instead of waking up with a bruise, she could have waked up dead. Looking into her half-mad eyes, Billy wondered if she might not welcome death.

'Leda, I have to go.'

'Of course,' she said. 'Just came for the straight dope, didn't you, Billy dear?'

'I'm sorry,' he said. 'I'm sorry about everything that's happened. Please believe me.' And, insanely, he heard himself adding: 'When you talk to Cary, give him my best.'

'He's hard to talk to now,' she said remotely. 'It's happening inside his mouth, you see. It's thickening his gums, plating his tongue. I can talk to him, but everything he says to me – all of his replies – come out in grunts.'