“Partly. Mainly because you’re sure somebody’s going to call a misdeal before you get a chance to bet.”

She was smiling. Her eyes were dark and bright under her wet lashes. There was something so alive about her it made my throat ache.

“Bet,” she said then. “Bet the hand, Harry Fannin.”

But I was still looking at her. “The limit,” I said. “With four it can’t be anything under the limit.”

“Suppose I raise? Suppose I’ve got a straight flush. That would win, wouldn’t it? You and your measly four aces.”

“Have you? My bets in.”

“God, we’re talking. Have you got any idea why we’re talking so much?”

There were beer bottles. There were tin cans and chunks of driftwood and seashells. There could have been hot coals.

Her arms were across my shoulders. Her body was warm and damp beneath me and her face was turned against the sand. My face was along her neck where her hair had fallen away and I could feel a pulse, fast at first and then slowing. And after a very long time the sound of the surf came back.

“Who dealt that?” she said then. “Oh, my God, did I deal that?”

I pressed my hand over her lips, turning my head. They were coming toward us along the water’s edge, talking, and she saw them and lay still.

One of them was sketching jerky little abstractions against the darkness with a cigarette. His voice was high-pitched and nasal but it carried across clearly as they passed us. “He’s a beautiful little boy,” he said, “beautiful. But the only person who knows if he’s mine or not is my wife. I love that kid, I do. But I tell you, I just don’t know if he’s mine—”

Surf took the rest of it. I watched them going away, not moving and hearing her breathing softly next to me.

Her voice was distant. “If you go now you won’t have to fumble through the talk,” she said. “It can be messy to fumble through, particularly when you don’t even know the girl’s name.”

“Mrs. Harry Fannin,” I told her.

I could feel her laughing without hearing any sounds or seeing her face. She said, “I did have the straight flush, Harry, and thanks. But it would be kind of silly to think there could be two winners in the same hand, wouldn’t it?”

“Marry me,” I told her. I didn’t know I was going to say that. You’ve got to think the whole thing was something you’d just invented to say that, and it was something I had had before. But I could count the times. I had had it once in the army in Texas but after a while it had come out that the girl had a husband getting shot at somewhere, and so there was nothing to do but go off with my lip quivering and get shot at myself. I’d had it once at college also but the girl was killed in an automobile wreck and what I did after that I didn’t much like to remember. I’d had it those two times and here it was again after six or eight years and how do you know you’ll ever find your way back to the same stretch of sand? So I said it again.

I had lifted myself to my elbows and she turned her head, watching me. “I told you I went through your wallet,” she said. “I saw your investigator’s license and that Sheriff’s Association card and the gun permit and, gosh, all sort of impressive things. But I guess I must have missed the release papers from that mental institution. I never did see them at all.”

I was kneeling. I dug out two cigarettes and lit them and gave her one, grinning back at her. I picked up her wallet where it had slipped out of her skirt and lit another match. Hawes, it said. Catherine.

“Harry?”

“Let’s get out of here, Hawes. Right now.”

She had lifted herself slightly, braced on one arm. She took up a handful of sand and let it run through her fingers. “It would be gone before we got to Pennsylvania Station,” she said remotely. She was looking past me. “Something like this, so damned quick. What was it, maybe twenty minutes? Old first-glance Cathy. You don’t think it’s the first time, do you? Go away, Fannin. Take another swim and wash the hayseed out of your hair. I was reading a Dostoievski novel before I came out for my little walk. I’ll go back and finish it now, so I can see what it’s like when people really suffer things that tear out their guts instead often cents’ worth of romantic twinge just because there’s moonlight and for five minutes you don’t have to feel alone anymore or—”

I had taken her by the shoulders. “Hawes, come on.”

“Oh, damn,” she said. “Oh, goddam.” She was chewing her lip and I was sure of it then if I hadn’t been before. Because you get so many with whom there’s never anything left. But here it was afterward and I was kneeling there and I was still feeling it. It hurt me to look at her. It hurt me the way her voice was, the way the line of her thigh joined her hip.

Which was romantic as all hell, but was still no concern of our two wandering companions. They were coming back up the beach and this time the other one of them was holding forth:

“I’m telling you, Lou, with three kids around you’re paying for fifteen meals a day. Fifteen. That’s one hundred and five meals a week. And when you’re doing it without love, well, brother—”

Her arms slipped around my neck then. “Fannin, Fannin, Fannin, it’s insane. Of all the idiotic, impossible, scatter-brained, impulsive… and I just don’t know what I’m going to tell Frank Sinatra in the morning!” She was trembling, maybe laughing, maybe crying, I don’t think it mattered which. Because we came together and it was all there again and it had to be right. It was. For maybe ten months.

CHAPTER 3

She was twenty-four. She had gone to Barnard College for two years, and she worked as a secretary in the sales department of a publishing house on Fourth Avenue. She had a mother and an older, unmarried sister named Estelle who lived on West 72nd Street, and she had been sharing an apartment in Greenwich Village with two other girls. She had a tiny scar under her left eyebrow from diving into water that was too shallow; and when she was six years old, before her father had died, she’d been lost in the Adirondack Mountains for three days. She’d camped out her share of times since then also.

“Sometimes it’s gotten a little messy, Harry,” she told me. “But I never knew what I was looking for. Now I don’t want anything else, just you and me.”

Just us, and Beautyrest made three. Maybe we could have gotten a patent on it after all. Once in a while we also boiled some eggs or went to the films.

Fannin had it, all right, and he had it badly. During his mottled career Fannin had also had several.32 and.38 caliber bullet holes in various inconsequential portions of his anatomy, a knife wound in his right shoulder, shrapnel in his left, not to mention two broken noses and sundry other minor disabilities. Once in a while he has even been known to pick up something which lasts, like smoker’s hack.

It happened on the 4th of June.

I’d been to Chicago for three days. I had those out-of-town jobs from time to time. This one was blackmail. I’d been trying to pick up some of the cash my client had paid out before the Illinois law could move in and impound it all. I’d made out well enough, but there’d been a lot of chasing around and I’d missed sleep. It was five o’clock in the morning when I hit LaGuardia Airport coming back, and I took a cab to the place without calling Cathy. She flicked on a small light while I was undressing.

“Baby,” she said. She could even look beautiful waking up.

“I was trying to be quiet,” I told her.

“Old Harry, the silent sleuth. I’ll bet you were.”

“I really was. I’m one weary husband, mam.”

“That weary?”

I got into bed. The sheets were crushed and warm and her arms came around me. “I’ll live,” I told her.

I woke up about eleven and phoned the client to make an appointment. I did not get out of bed to make the call. I kept looking at the mirror across the room and grinning at what Cathy had written on it in soap before she’d gone to the office. It said, “Go ahead, you bastard, sleep while I slave.” I called her next.