Wife or Death (2 page)

It was a long narrow room with rows of green lockers and wooden benches between the rows. Corinne seated herself on a bench. Denton handed her one of the glasses, sat down beside her and adjusted his sword to rest on his lap.

“You seem awfully familiar with the men's locker room,” he grinned. “Do you often rendezvous here?”

She grinned back. “Don't you remember the night of the high school senior prom?”

“Egads!” Denton said. “Trust a woman to dredge up a thing like that! I was only seventeen, and you were a fifteen-year-old brat with orthodontic braces.”

“They didn't prevent you from trying to buss me,” Corinne said tartly.

“Trying?” he said with a leer. “As I recall it, we had ourselves quite a necking session.”

“Trust a man to remember
that
.” She took a sip of her drink, smiling. “You know, Jim, I was so wide-eyed in those days I thought our fumbling little smooch-party meant we were engaged. It was a real blow when I saw you at the next dance with that horrible Sally Means.”

“I didn't have sense enough to know what I wanted back then, Corinne. By the time I achieved wisdom, you'd married George.”

“Whoa, boy, down!” she said. “This is just a conversation between old friends.”

“That's right.” He grinned again. “In the men's locker room, which was
your
idea. Anyway, what makes you think I regard you as anything but an old friend?”

She colored and took another quick sip. “Touché, old friend. Shall we start over?”

Denton set his own drink down on the bench between them. “All right, Corinne. What the devil are we doing here?”

“I told you. I thought it might make you feel better to talk about it.”

“Talk about what?”

“Oh, don't be dense! About the nasty gossip, Jim. You know I'm not the prying type, but if there's anything I can do—”

“There isn't,” he said shortly.

Corinne looked stricken. “That'll teach me to mind my own business.” She rose from the bench.

He pulled her back down. “I guess I'm touchier on the subject than I realized, Corinne. Thanks for the try. But unloading my troubles on you isn't going to solve anything. I've about reached the point in this thing where the only one I want to confide in is a lawyer.”

“I'm sorry to hear that, Jim.”

Why was she sorry? Corinne, like everyone else in town, must know that Angel was a full-time tramp, about as moral as Don Marquis's Mehitabel.

Undoubtedly it was his own fault. He had known Angel was a tramp when he met her, and it had been romantic idiocy to think marriage would change her. To bring a big-city alley cat into a small town and expect to make a respectable tabby out of her! He must have had rocks in his head.

“What?” Denton said.

“I said I'm sorry I poked my big nose into your private life.”

“Big nose! It's the cutest little nose in town.”

This time her smile was different. “We're still friends, Jim?”

He raised his glass. “Two of the Three Musketeers.”

The slatted hall door was suddenly opened and Julian Overton, the club secretary, peered in at them. He looked first surprised, then coy.

“Excuse
me
, folks,” the fat man said. “I saw the light through the slats and thought somebody'd forgotten to turn it off. Don't let me interrupt whatever's going on.” And winking at Denton, he backed off and let the door swing to again.

“Oh, great,” Corinne said in an annoyed voice. “We would have to be caught by dear dirty-minded Mother Overton. By the time the dance is over, it'll be all over the club that you had half my clothes off. Let's get out of here, Jim.”

2

The barroom was so crowded now that they had to finish their drinks standing just inside the doorway. Denton tried to work his way through for refills, but he gave up. Corinne was on tiptoes, craning and peering.

“It's a lost cause for both of us,” he advised her. “I'm not thin enough, and you're too short.”

“Can you see George? He's dressed as Captain Hook.”

He would be, Denton thought. It was symbolic of the Guests' relationship that George should choose a harmonizing costume. Peter Pan and Captain Hook belonged together. As Cleopatra and Athos did not.

From his height of six-one Denton could see everyone in the mob. He spotted two pirates, but neither was George. And Angel was still among the missing.

He turned to report to Corinne when a voice behind them said in a shrill whisper, “Oh, look, Olive! Ralph Crosby drowning his sorrows! There, at the far end of the bar.”

Denton glanced over his shoulder. The whisperer was stout, porker-snouted Ellen Wright; she was dressed as a female clown. Her whisper had been directed to a skinny witch, whom Denton recognized as Olive Haber, a floor nurse at the county hospital.

Wondering why the county district attorney should be “drowning his sorrows,” Denton looked toward the far end of the bar. Ralph Crosby's fleshy face was purple; his usually well-combed, Indian-black hair was tumbled all over his head; he was sweating like the farmer he was costumed to be. He wore overalls and a red bandana, and he carried a pitchfork.

Skinny Olive Haber said in a vibrant
sotto voce
, “Did you see her breeze right
past
him with a cool hello, Ellen? I thought I'd
die
at his expression!”

The piggish female clown nodded eagerly. “I wonder who the new man is. I don't suppose you've heard, Olive?”

“No. I saw her dancing with three different ones. Who she finally disappeared with I don't know.”

Gossiping bitches! Denton thought in disgust. He turned to Corinne again, but when he saw her face the subject of the pair's whispers suddenly became clear to him.

So District Attorney Ralph Crosby had been his wife's latest bed-partner, he thought with bitter amusement. Apparently he was a little out of date; he had been under the impression that she was still sleeping with young Arnold Long. With the rapid turnover, it was not surprising that he was not always able to keep abreast of Angel's adulteries. Husbands were usually the last to hear such news, anyway.

He wondered idly who the district attorney's successor was.

Ellen Wright began to whisper something else. Corinne said quickly, drowning it out: “I think, Jim, I'll accept that invitation to dance now.”

Corinne kept chattering as they climbed through the jam. She chattered about everything but the subject of the clown-witch whispers, to Denton's relief.

The dance crowd upstairs had thinned down to about half a dozen indefatigable couples. Perhaps half a dozen more were sitting around, watching the dancers in the usual almost-ready-to-go-home trance. One of the seated couples was Angel Denton and George Guest.

Corinne hesitated for the tiniest moment. But then she was steering Denton toward the pair, saying “Hello!” in a bright voice, and slipping into the chair beside her husband.

Angel looked up with one of her most enchanting smiles. “Hi,” she said in her unexpectedly husky voice. “We've been wondering where you two were.”

The husky quality was surprising because, from her appearance, she should have sounded little-girlish and pouty. Like Brigitte Bardot, Angel was one of the rare mid-century breed of women whose bodies were all sex and whose faces were all child. The huge innocent uncomplicated primer-blue eyes, the sulky little red mouth with pushed-out lips, always slightly parted, the small perfect nose, the ceramic complexion, the tumbled pile of blonde hair—these were set on a body mature, voluptuous, lazily flaunted. The combination was irresistible to men, as Denton knew only too well from his own experience with her. It was no accident, Denton had often thought, that Vladimir Nabokov's
Lolita
fascinated men and enraged women. The child-woman image touched taboos deeply buried in Western man; and when an Angel came along, with her open-mouthed availability, hell was bound to break loose.

Tonight she had really gone all out, Denton mused as he looked down at her; it was a wonder the other women hadn't got her behind a tree somewhere on the golf course and clawed her to ribbons. She had used the Cleopatra masquerade as an excuse for exposing the goodies conventional dress could merely hint at. The only thing remotely Egyptian about her get-up was the headdress, a towering affair distinguished principally by blue cowhorns—which he should be wearing, Denton thought wryly, and which had been worn in ancient Egypt a millennium or more before the Nile siren's reign. Angel had copied it from a magazine photo of a detail from an Egyptian tomb. For the rest, she had draped a sheer black nylon scarf diagonally over her shoulders and across her breasts, knotted at the back (“That's about as Egyptian as a bikini bra,” he had told her mildly at home, and she had said with an innocent stare, “Oh my gosh! Well, darling, it's too late now,” and blithely continued dressing); she had put on the sheerest of black briefs, evading the law against indecent exposure by the cunning arrangement of sequins sewn on it, and over the briefs a sheer flared skirt barely longer than what it purported to cover; her legs were bare; her feet were in hooked-up sandals; and she had stuck a rhinestone button in her navel. Her large firm breasts were mistily discernible under the scarf, two mounds of milky whiteness; even the color of her nipples could be seen. (“Aren't you afraid you'll be arrested?” Denton had asked her, and she had looked sincerely puzzled: “But darling, it's a
private
affair, at the
club
,” as if that made it all right.)

George Guest was sitting between Denton's wife and his own, his long legs stuck way out, a tow-haired, rawboned length of embarrassed pirate. He wore an old pair of fireman-type boots, with the tops cuffed down, over black slacks; he had borrowed the red cummerbund of his summer tux outfit to wear as a sash, in which he had thrust a rubber dagger; his blouse was one of the wilder sports shirts he doted on, open at the throat; and for his pirate's hat he had taken an ancient felt, pinned its brim up in front, and painted a white skull-and-crossbones on it. He had either lost or thrown away his eyepatch, and the Captain Hook part of his costume—a detachable sleeve designed to fit over one hand with a hook at the end of it—lay in his lap.

Guest said to Corinne, “'Lo, honey,” in a curiously self-conscious voice, and then he said, “Hi, Jamesy,” even more so.

For one incredulous instant the thought crossed Denton's mind that Angel's mysterious new conquest was George Guest. The next instant Denton experienced shame. He could no more conceive of George's making advances to Angel than he could imagine himself pursuing Corinne with lust in his eye. Three lifetimes of friendship stood in the way; it would have been something like incest.

And if that makes me the world's biggest sucker, Denton thought, the world's biggest sucker I am. Not George. Not old George. Even Angel, he thought, would hesitate before making a play for Corinne's husband and his own best friend.

George was just showing husbandly guilt at having deserted his wife for so long, Denton decided. He must have run into Angel after she returned from her nuzzling party with whomever she had been fooling around all evening; and, if he knew George, the idiot had probably latched on to Angel to keep her respectable for what was left of the ball.

Corinne seemed to be having thoughts of her own. She asked her husband a bit too sweetly, “Been having fun, dear?”

“Oh, hacking around,” George said. “I figured you must be in the bar with this character. I was just going downstairs to look.”

Angel said to Denton, “Darling, we're all invited to an after-the-dance snack party at the Wyatts'. I mean the four of us. Isn't that nice?”

“Fine,” Denton said without enthusiasm.

“I think Mr. Wyatt's considering making me a TV offer,” his wife went on, uttering her strident little laugh. “Of course, I wouldn't think of accepting. But it is nice to know you're still remembered in show business.”

That routine again, Denton thought. Angel had let it be known in Ridgemore that in marrying Denton two years before she had sacrificed a brilliant theatrical career. To hear her tell it, she had been hip deep in Broadway and Hollywood offers when he snatched her out of the arms of fame and fortune. He was the only one in town who knew that he had found her in a third-rate night club in Buffalo doing a strip act.

He had been well aware that Angel grabbed at his proposal of marriage to escape a bump-and-grind career that was going nowhere. He had been in the full grip of her sexual magnetism at the time. Even so, he had known that her only exploitable talent was disrobing in public. That was what had brought the customers back night after night—himself included—to the dumpy bistro where he first caught her act.

He remembered once remarking to her, when they had gotten home after an evening with friends devoted largely to Angel's fantasizing, that if she had ever received an offer from a producer it was for a one-night stand in a hotel room. Angel had seemed genuinely hurt; her pouting lips had drooped and she had begun to cry. And the farther into the past her professional career receded, the more glamorous it became. After a while Denton had given up ragging her about it, convinced that she believed it all herself.

It was this adolescent clutch of Angel's on a dream-world that had kept him from leaving her when he found out about her first act of infidelity. And even though her subsequent conduct had driven Denton to the point where he no longer cared what she did, or with whom, he still could not find it within himself, to drum up any normal male outrage. In spite of her lusting and lust-arousing body, she remained the child her face proclaimed her.

Denton came back to the present. Corinne Guest was asking, with the slightest frown, “How did the Wyatts happen to include George and me, Angel?”