Chapter VI (1)

Ruth Porges could not have explained, even to herself, why the scream had unnerved her so. Like the others, she'd been unable to identify the voice. But she did have a faint, will-of-the-wisp kind of suspicion that it was Lynn Prentiss who had cried out in shock and horror. It hadn't sounded like Susan's voice at the desk or the voice of Joyce Sanderson from the linotype room.

And somehow, all morning, she's been expecting something alarming to happen. She couldn't have explained that either. It was just that--well, things were coming to a head as far as Lathrup was concerned. She was reaching the saturation point in arousing bitter anger and adding fuel to long-standing grievances.

Ruth Porges had only to close her eyes to bring it all back. She'd thought that what had happened had been filed securely away in her mind; was just a collapsed file covered with dust, the pages so yellow and brittle they'd crumble if she thumbed through them again.

But now she knew better. It wasn't that old a file. It had all happened less than ten months ago, and it had left a raw red wound in her mind. It could be put in very simple terms--no file was really needed. It would have sounded like a musical comedy refrain if it hadn't been so cruelly tragic. Over and over, echoing still.

_She stole my man._ Went right after him, with no scruples and no holds barred. And when she discovered that he wasn't too accomplished a lover--not too good in bed, why not say it?--she cast him aside like an old shoe.

Ruth Porges leaned back and shut her eyes and let the memories come flooding back.

* * * * *

He was wearing a gray trench coat and his hair was short-cropped, and he looked handsome and distinguished enough to make her think of Paris in the spring and she was sitting alone at a table in a Left Bank cafe, and there he was coming toward her, smiling his handsome, slightly crooked smile and it was just three years after the end of World War II.

But of course it hadn't been like that at all. She'd met him at a party in the Village and he'd been a writer of a sort and a painter of a sort and knew quite a few important people in the musical world. As far as she knew he hadn't sold a single story or article to a magazine and he certainly wasn't wealthy, but he always seemed to have enough money to take a girl out for the evening and spend perhaps fifteen or twenty dollars and he never tried to economize by suggesting they go to little Italian restaurants where you could get red wine by the bottle and the bill never exceeded three or four dollars.

No lavish spender, no Rainbow Room sort of escort, but her own salary was large enough to enable her to go to the Stork Club occasionally in the company of girl friends with escorts to spare, so she didn't begrudge him a fairly modest evening's entertainment when he seemed to like her so much.

And he did like her--no question about that. Roger Bendiner, the only man who'd ever really thought of her, entirely and all the time, as a woman who had so much ... so very much ... to give to a man.

"So you want me to meet your boss?" he said. "That's quite amusing, you know. A reversal of the usual sort of thing. A harassed husband comes home to a wife who's a little on the uncooperative side and says: 'Darling, I'm bringing the boss home for dinner. Try to build me up instead of tearing me down, just for this one evening, and make the meal a little outstanding, eh?'

"But this way it's much simpler. Your boss is a woman and I just have to charm her a little. All you have to worry about is whether or not I have enough charm. But since we're not married yet I'll have an ace to start with. Every executive-type woman is interested in an unmarried man, no matter how much he may be lacking in the social graces and even if he has a bashed in nose."

"You haven't a bashed in nose and you're not lacking in the social graces," she reminded him, smiling a little.

"Well, that's a matter of opinion," he said. "Of course you're right about my nose. But my ears are much too large and only Clark Gable could get away with ears this size and still--well, you know what I mean."

"I think you're just as handsome," she said.

The evening went so well at first that any kind of resentment directed toward Lathrup would have seemed to her ungracious and lacking in common sense. She wasn't quite sure why she'd invited Lathrup to meet Roger; was unable to explain it later to her own satisfaction and would have been at a complete loss to explain it to anyone else.

The impulse hadn't been prompted by a desire to impress Lathrup with her capacity to attract and hold a handsome man or to ingratiate herself with the woman in any way. She'd begun to dislike Lathrup a little even then, along with every other member of the editorial staff.

Probably she'd done it to impress Roger. Not that he'd needed to be impressed in that way, but to a woman deeply in love and not quite able to accept the miracle at face value a desire to shine, to seem exceptional in all respects can become almost a compulsion. And Lathrup _was_ decorative, an exceptional woman in so many different ways that it was a feather in Ruth Porges' cap to claim her as a close friend as well as her employer. Simply to parade her before Roger in that capacity was so irresistible a temptation that she had succumbed to it with no particular misgivings, since it had never even occurred to her that Roger could transfer his adoration from her to another woman.

The transference had taken place so gradually that at first she had remained completely unaware of it. Even when she saw them together on the dance floor, and Roger was holding Lathrup a little more tightly and intimately than most of the other men were holding their partners and their cheeks seemed to remain in contact for a surprisingly long time--seemed, in fact, almost never to separate--she did not become in any way alarmed.

Annoyed, yes. She _was_ a little annoyed, because even during a lull in the music they remained so completely absorbed in each other that they did not once glance in her direction.

But she thought nothing of it, really, and when they returned to the table and sat down and kept looking at each other, completely ignoring her, it was a full ten or fifteen minutes before her color began to rise a little and a look of concern crept into her eyes.

She wasn't angry at Roger even then ... or with Lathrup. She put their behavior down to a momentary infatuation brought on by Roger's five Manhattans, and Lathrup's three Old Fashioneds, an infatuation which would evaporate like dew in bright sunlight the instant the next dance number began and she and Roger would get out on the floor together, and she'd mold her body to his and he'd hold her more tightly than he'd have dared to hold Lathrup, and their lips would come together at least once in the course of the dance in a long and passionate kiss.

The lights were dim; no one would see. It would not cause a scandal. It would be in bad taste and unacceptable on such a dance floor in the presence of patrons who would never think of going so far, however much they might want to do so, and if in a brighter light it might even have brought a tap on the shoulder from an irate head waiter.

But she'd do it anyway ... she'd prove to Lathrup that she was a woman who was not afraid to dance with her man like a hellion on a Village cellar dance floor, like a real gone Beat nineteen years of age with a rose pinned in her hair and an upthrust of breasts that could make the most distinguished of midtown, gray-templed, capital-gains league patrons feel as primitive as a Dawn Man.

There were swanky night clubs where it was winked at and took place all the time, of course--the danse primeval. But this just didn't happen to be that kind of night club. She'd make it that kind, however--for Roger and herself alone. And if anyone saw or objected or tried to interfere she'd really show them what a hellion she could be. If the protests really angered her--she'd take off her clothes.

She suddenly realized that she'd allowed herself to become more drunk that she'd ever imagine she could be. She'd had five Manhattans too, and the last one she hadn't sipped. She downed it in a gulp, her eyes on Roger's face.

Roger had apparently forgotten that there was more than one woman seated at the table with him. And that woman wasn't herself. He was looking at Lathrup now in a way that made her turn away with a half-sob of shock. The pure animal flamed in his eyes. He was undressing her with his eyes and she was smiling back at him, apparently not caring in the least, giving him the kind of encouragement that could only be characterized as lascivious, the look of a wanton lost to all shame.

Ladylike as well ... that was the most shocking, revolting, unbelievable part of it.

Ruth Porges had an impulse to get up, lean across the table and slap Lathrup's face.

In her present state of intoxication it would not have been a ladylike slap. She was quite sure of that. She'd lose her job, of course, along with the man she'd already lost--her satyr-lover whom she'd allowed herself to idealize. And to think that he'd held her in his arms, and she'd yielded her virginal body to him, surrendering utterly to his fiercely insistent, madly passionate caresses. A man incapable of loyalty, a man consumed by the kind of gross sensuality that degraded a woman by its complete lack of respect for her as an individual.

If he could look at Lathrup that way, at her thighs and bourgeoning breasts--the more bourgeoning because of the wanton way she'd constricted their swelling roundness--and her hair and lips and eyes ... he could look at any woman that way, feel the same way about any woman attractive enough to catch his eye and even some who were the opposite of attractive, but who had something about them that stirred men of primitive instincts to a frenzy of desire. The more coarse and slatternly the woman the more some men seemed to be stirred.

Not that Lathrup was coarse and slatternly--just the opposite. And Roger was the kind of man who would be repelled by a real slut. She gave him that much credit. He was nothing if not fastidious, he would seek to pluck only the unique and delicate blooms that grew very high up, on trees of rare growth arching above white marble terraces, their branches stirred by breezes from the blue Mediterranean, or the New York equivalent of such blooms.

What kind of woman was Lathrup anyway? A hard, executive-type woman two-thirds of the time, a woman some people might wonder about and even just possibly think a lesbian--although there was little about her to suggest that--and then, _all woman_, so completely feminine that she could bring a man to his knees before her with a single provocative glance.

How could she hope to compete with a woman like that? And she no longer wanted to, because Roger was clearly unworthy of her, not the kind of man she'd thought him, not the eternally devoted lover who had found in her alone something special that he had been searching for all his life, just as she had been searching....

She stiffened suddenly, an intolerable anguish arising in her and making it difficult for her to breathe. Roger had arisen from the table again and was moving out onto the dance floor with Lathrup held firmly in his embrace. The orchestra was playing a waltz now and the tempo of the music was slow and sensuous and Lathrup had abandoned all pretense of reserve.

The way their bodies blended, seemed almost to melt together, was more outrageous than the Village cellar wildness she had pictured to herself a moment before and which she would not have hesitated to engage in if she'd felt that Roger had wanted to feel that close to her in a defiantly intimate way.

This was a more outrageous intimacy, because it was unmistakably the clinging embrace of two lovers in a darkened room, behind the privacy of a securely locked door.

Neither of them seemed to care that the dance floor wasn't quite that dimly lit and that their completely shameless amorousness would be observed by everyone on the floor. And then she saw that they were kissing each other just as shamelessly, that their lips were meeting and clinging, and that one of the kisses seemed to go on and on.

She had opened her lips and....

Oh, dear God, how could she endure watching them, knowing what such a kiss could mean, how it could burn and scorch and drive a man and woman deeply, truly in love, to the kind of madness that wasn't in the least profane when it was sanctified by that kind of love. But when it wasn't--

How she ever lived through the rest of the evening without becoming hysterical and screaming accusations at both of them she had never been able to explain or analyze in a rational way to her own satisfaction and seal away in the mental file that would become, from time to time, a raw, profusely bleeding wound again.

Perhaps the salve which Roger had applied to the wound toward the end of the evening had helped a little. He'd begun to pour it on at the end of the second dance, chiefly by noticing her again and pressing her hand warmly, and when they arose to leave he was all courtesy, all consideration again.

He'd put Lathrup into a taxi at her own request and they'd gone home together. Not to her home, but to Roger's apartment. But for those three weeks Roger's apartment had become more of a home to her than the two-room, rent-controlled apartment she'd occupied for ten years on the northern fringe of the Village.

As the taxi shot westward and then turned south toward the Chelsea section--the night club was on Fifty-Second Street just east of Broadway--his arm went around her and he pressed her very tightly to him.

"Your boss is quite a woman, Honeybunch," he said. "But she can't hold a candle to you. All right, she's a top-drawer beauty, distinctly on the special side. There are a lot of men who would find her irresistible, but not me. No matter how much I found myself attracted to her it wouldn't ... well, flower into an immediate interest, the kind of interest that doesn't quite make you know whether you're coming or going."

She wasn't deceived or mollified, but some instinct of caution deep in her mind prevented her from giving too free a rein to her anger.

"Your interest in her seemed immediate enough to me," she said. "I happened to notice the way you were dancing."

He gave her waist an even tighter squeeze. "Good grief--you can hardly blame me for going overboard just a little. How often does a guy like me get to dance with a lady in sables?"

"She never wears sables--or mink either. It just happens to be an eccentricity of hers. I wish to hell you'd shut up and not try to be amusing."

"Okay, let's not have an argument about it. We had fun, didn't we? It was a good evening."

"Not to me, it wasn't."

"But why, for Pete's sake? Tell me why? What did I do, that was so unusual? Do you mind if I tell you something? Please don't get on a high horse, don't lose your temper--"

"I've already lost it. It's so far lost I'll probably never get it back again."

"All right, but just listen ... please. You're a wonderful person. But you have so low a boiling point at times that you're your own worst enemy. You cut off your nose to spite your face. I do it, too ... often enough. Maybe that's why we get along so well together."

"Do we? Right now I'd say we were more like a tiger and a lion in a cage together."

"All right. A tiger and a lion can get along very well together, if their temperaments coincide. They can even mate and give birth to a _tigron_. There's one at the Bronx Zoo. In fact--"

"Now you're trying to be amusing again. You'd better be damned serious, because I was never more serious in my life ... about what happened on that dance floor. I'm going to say something that will shock you. You think I'm a prude. You've said so often enough, despite the fact that I've never behaved like one with you in bed, have I? _Have I?_"

His eyes became suddenly serious. "No, darling--of course not. And if I ever called you a prude I'm sorry. That was only when I first met you and you did seem--"

"A scared virgin? All right, maybe I was. You wouldn't understand, probably, if I told you what torments I went through before I met you; what a high, terrible price I had to pay for feeling that way, for being like that. Most people think it amusing."

"I never did. I thought it tragic but I loved you all the more because of it."

"You felt sorry for me, did you? Pitied me?"

"I didn't say that. Do we have to talk about it now? Do you want to spoil the rest of the night?"

"What rest of the night? Do you think after what happened this evening there's going to be any more fun in bed for us?"

"Be quiet, will you? Drop it. I know what it cost you to say that. You're not the kind of woman who thinks in those terms. What has happened between us meant something to me. Why can't you believe it?"

"Oh, yes--it probably did mean something. Laying a round-heels would mean something to even a young hoodlum with about as much sensitivity as a chimpanzee. It's important to the male. I've been told that."

He said nothing in reply, but he withdrew his arm from her waist, and sat very straight and still at her side. She could imagine what he was thinking. He was afraid of angering her further, of saying the wrong thing. What _could_ he say, really? There were no right words, everything he told her would be a lie.

She'd seen the way he'd kissed Lathrup on the dance floor and the burning outrage, the shame she'd felt, after all she'd meant to him--or had allowed herself to think she'd meant to him--couldn't be driven from her mind by anything he might say.

She looked down at her legs. She had fine legs, shapely legs, and she had a good body too, a damned good body, but all that she had been able to do was unleash a savage lust in him and now that lust had been turned elsewhere.

If she'd known the truth about him at the beginning she wouldn't have allowed him to touch her. She'd have--yes, scratched his eyes out. She felt degraded, soiled, and the band of despair and bitter anger she'd felt on leaving the night club continued to tighten about her heart.

She'd ask to be taken home. She'd demand that he tell the driver to continue on to the Village. If he thought for one moment she'd go to his apartment now and spend the rest of the night with him he was a fool as well as an amorous opportunist with nothing but concealed evil in his soul.

Concealed? That was good. He hadn't made any attempt to conceal it on the dance floor, hadn't cared how much he hurt her or made her feel ignored, rejected, degraded. And he had dared to call it a good evening, had dared to pretend that she hadn't noticed, or would be broad-minded enough to dismiss what he'd done as meaningless, just a light flirtation that could be dismissed with a shrug of the shoulders.

For all his brazen disloyalty and the progress he'd made with Lathrup in one short hour he didn't know enough about how a sensitive, completely devoted woman would feel about such behavior to make him anything but a clod at heart, a miserable excuse for a lover whom no woman in her right mind would look at twice.

What was wrong with Lathrup? Couldn't she see what kind of man he was? Hadn't she even suspected the truth about him? If she'd taken him away from a completely unattractive woman, some ugly-looking strumpet or a vicious nag, it would have been easy enough to find excuses for him and to think of him as romantic and misunderstood. But couldn't she see that he was a switch artist, and a very clumsy one at that, drawn to a new face like a moth to a flame?

The more she thought about it the more she became choked with fury. She found herself unable to say a word, even when the cab turned west on Thirty-fourth Street and continued on toward his apartment.

He spoke again then, and there was a kind of pleading tenderness in his voice.

"Let's pretend it didn't happen," he said. "I was pretty tight, I guess. And I swear to you I didn't make a deliberate play for her. Believe me, I didn't. That dance production was her idea--"

She turned on him, her eyes blazing. "What a stupid, conceited thing to say! Production is good. It certainly was that. If you'd been dancing naked together you couldn't have made more of a spectacle of yourselves."

"She's a very attractive woman and I'm only human, darling. Sometimes you seem to forget that."

"That's the oldest male excuse in the world. But just let a woman use it--and see how far she gets."

"Oh, I don't know. Lots of women with a great deal of integrity, completely devoted wives, let themselves go a little when they're dancing with exceptionally good-looking guys, and their husbands don't blacken their eyes or threaten to divorce them. Not if they're mature and realistic enough to--"

"Shut up, will you? I've heard enough. I'm not married to you, remember that."

"I don't see what that has to do with it, either way. I'm just trying to be logical, that's all. I'm not stupid enough to believe that only men are capable of thinking logically and realistically, as so many people claim. Women have a logic of their own. I'll concede that. But it's on a different plane entirely."

"Are you through? I'd think you were just talking to hear yourself talk, if I couldn't read your mind like a book. You're trying to cover up. You think if you pile up enough important-sounding excuses you'll be able to get around me again."

"Will you listen to me--"

"I'm through listening. I'm not going home with you and that's final. Tell the driver to turn south when we get to Eighth Avenue."

"Why? It doesn't make sense. You know I love you."

"I'll just bet."

How she ever allowed herself to be persuaded she never quite knew.

She no longer felt any real warmth toward him. She was quite sure, in fact, that she hated him now ... loathed and despised him. But something deep in her nature urged her to have it out with him, to come to a complete showdown in the apartment they'd shared together, to let him know, in an unmistakable way, with gestures as well as words, that they were at the parting of the ways.

They'd kept their voices low, but she was by no means sure that the driver hadn't overheard some of their conversation and the thought brought a hot flush to her cheeks, made her even angrier than she had been. What right had he to expose her to such an indignity, when he knew how sensitive she was about discussing private matters in public? He'd raised his voice at times, just a little, and she was sure that though they had spoken in whispers most of the time the driver had been all ears and was doubtless gloating over another choice tidbit of Manhattan falling-out-between-lovers.

He'd talked about Lathrup, mentioned her by name, and probably nine taxi drivers out of ten knew that the Eaton-Lathrup publications were a big-time magazine group and that Lathrup herself was often mentioned by Winchell. She'd been on TV often enough--and so had Ruth Porges.

"_I picked up a couple of real dog-and-cat fighting celebrities last night. Brother! It happens about three times a night, when you're cruising around Fifty-Second. They don't care what they say--get a big kick out of airing their dirty linen when they know you can't help overhearing what they're saying. Yap, yap, yap. The guy apologizing, making excuses and the dame ready to stand off and lam him one. They might as well stand in Times Square with a megaphone--_"

But the driver seemed courteous enough when the cab drew in to the curb in front of Roger's apartment-house residence, perhaps because Roger tossed him two dollars and told him to keep the change, but more probably because he was a very young, pleasant-faced lad who looked as innocent as a new-shorn lamb.

Roger had two cocktails with cherries aswim in them standing on a tray five minutes after he'd turned the key in the door of his apartment. He was very good at that and even now, despite her anger, she admired that aspect of his woman-pleasing competence.

"Why don't you take off your dress and be comfortable, darling," he said. "We're not exactly strangers, you know."

She shook her head. "You're entitled to believe what you wish. But we started being strangers about two hours ago. Right now I feel as if I knew absolutely nothing about you--beyond the fact that when you meet an attractive woman for the first time she's tight in your arms a half hour later. You don't believe in letting a single blade of grass grow under your feet, do you?"

"Now look--" he protested. "Do you have to be _quite_ that touchy? I'll go further than I did. It was partly my fault. You could say, I suppose, that I put up no resistance, was carried away by the liquor, the soft lights, the music. And I was plenty pie-eyed. It usually takes a dozen Manhattans to make me as tight as I was a few hours ago. Too much acid in the system or something like that. It happens sometimes."

"It's worn off now ... is that it? So you've got a perfect excuse and any other woman would understand and fall into your arms and beg to be forgiven for her lack of understanding."

"No, you've a right to be a little burned up. But do you have to work over it the way you're doing, build it up into something criminal? You'd think I'd tried to rape her or something."

"You almost did. I was afraid for a moment we'd be asked to leave ... and not too politely."

"You're exaggerating a hell of a lot and I'm sure you know it."

"Nothing of the kind. The way you were dancing wouldn't have been tolerated in half the dives in the Village. I mean the real dives--not the kind that are reserved for tourists."

"You know all about them, I suppose. Have you been to them often?"

"I've never stepped inside one. But I wasn't born yesterday. I know what goes on in such places."

"Look, we're getting nowhere. Will you believe me and listen? If I met her tomorrow on the street I'd just say hello, and smile and tip my hat and pass on. I swear it."

"I can just picture it. She'd smile back, and the way she smiles when she knows what she wants and will have no trouble getting it--doesn't require any effort on her part. It just comes naturally. And going home with her would come naturally to you, too.

"She has a beautiful place. Have you seen it? Of course you haven't ... because you met her tonight for the first time. So perhaps I'd better describe it for you. You go up in a private elevator, and you step out and there you are--in a real golden Rembrandt setting. The lighting is the newest Paris importation, and there are a lot of abstract paintings on the walls of her bedroom, you know, all little colored squares in different colors that mean absolutely nothing but only hang on the walls of the major league museums because the smaller museums can't afford them.

"'I'll be back in a minute,' she'll say, and away she'll go, tripping lightly, into the bathroom--all black onyx with gold fixtures--and when she comes out you'll be sitting with a cocktail glass in your hand--she'll have invited you to mix your own, with just the right shade of icing, at a private bar that will knock your eyes out--and when you see what she's wearing, or isn't wearing, you'll forget where you are and think you're in a kind of glorified cathouse."

She became a little frightened when she saw the way Roger was looking at her and lowered her eyes, wishing she'd kept silent. Simply had it out with him, the way she'd intended and walked out of the apartment for the last time, slamming the door behind her.

Why had she ranted on so recklessly? She'd talked like a shrew driven half out of her mind by jealousy, and that had been a mistake. It was giving him too much ammunition, giving him the kind of satisfaction he wasn't entitled to. Angering him at the same time, making him look at her in a strange way, a way new to her, as if the suggestive picture she'd painted for him of a totally shameless Lathrup had aroused in him instincts that were base and dangerous. Something about the look not only scared her, it caused her to pale a little and move further away from him.

Then her own anger came sweeping back and she said the worst possible thing, and could have bitten her tongue out the instant it left her lips. "Don't look so shocked, little man. I've a feeling it wouldn't take much finesse on the part of any woman to seduce you."

It was cruelly insulting for two reasons, but she realized that too late. He wasn't a little man. He was a very big man and completely sure of himself as far as his masculinity was concerned. And no man likes to think that it is the woman who is doing the seducing. It was almost as bad as those ridiculous cases you read about in the newspapers, where a man goes into court and claims he's been taken advantage of by a woman in a physical way, his high-minded morality impaired. A male virgin, backed into a corner by an Amazon determined to rape him.

She remembered one case in particular--it flashed across her mind in that instant of wild folly completely unbidden. Three young hoodlum girls had captured a man at the point of a gun, taken him for an auto ride and forced him to make love to them. What she'd just said was like telling Roger that, in circumstances like that, he wouldn't have been more than eager to oblige, or found the experience less than exhilarating.

"I asked you to take off your dress and get comfortable," Roger said, still looking at her in that frightening way. "What's got into you, anyway? What makes you think that Helen Lathrup would be so much more attractive to me than you are? Right at this moment I'll waive the soft lighting and the abstract paintings and even the gold-and-onyx bathroom. I'm just a plain guy with plain tastes, anyway. In room decorations, I mean. I like my women to be a little on the special side, decorative and all that. I'm speaking in the plural, because you insist on it so strongly, and seem to feel that I should have a lot of women chasing after me. You probably wouldn't believe me if I told you I've had only three serious affairs in my life and one of them ended in divorce and the two I didn't marry I would have married under ordinary circumstances, but death can move in fast sometimes and make even marriage impossible.

"No--I didn't poison them. I'm not a bluebeard, whatever else you may think me. One died in my arms and it kills me even now to think about it and I'll probably never get over it. Died in my arms with the blood running out of her mouth, in a hospital with an incurable disease and she was glad that I could be there. There was one parting, years later, on completely friendly terms, with a girl who didn't think I'd make too good a husband, because we just happened to be temperamentally poles apart in our thinking. And that's the whole of it--until I met you."

Ordinarily what he'd said would have moved her, and completely changed the way she felt. Banished her fear even, all of it, made her willing to forgive him. But she was beyond herself with anger still, too confused to think clearly.

"I'm going to leave you," she said. "This is the end. I'm going right out of here now and I'm not coming back."

"Sit down!" he said, his voice suddenly harsher than she'd ever known it to be. "You love me and you know it. You're just being a stubborn little fool. Sit down and relax. And drink this cocktail. It will do you good."

"No," she said. "I'm leaving right now."

What he did then was totally unexpected, she wouldn't have thought him capable of it.

He stepped forward, grasped the top of her dress and ripped it all the way down her back to her waist. Then he half-swung her about and planted a kiss in the middle of her back, so fierce a kiss that it bruised her flesh, causing her to cry out in protest.

He held her firmly and continued to kiss the bare flesh of her shoulders and back, and then he ripped more of the dress away, and buried his face between her breasts, a strange, stricken, almost sobbing sound coming from his throat, as if even in that moment of primitive love-making he was begging her to relent a little, to forgive him and be tender, to run her fingers through his hair, as she had so often done in the past.

But she was too frightened to do anything but struggle violently to free herself. Always in the past he had made love impetuously, his great strength sometimes causing him to hurt her a little. But never had his ardor gotten out of control and his hands moved over her trembling body in quite so demanding a way. He was pressing her to him so fiercely she felt half-smothered, his fingers bruising her thighs, her buttocks, refusing to relinquish their grip.

She feared only his capacity for self-control, not that he would be deliberately cruel or brutally force her to submit to him against her will. But she did not know how far he could hold in check his desperate need to make this renewal of their intimacy a kind of masculine triumph so complete and overwhelming that it would bring them closer than they had ever been before and put an end to all future uncertainty. And in so doing, he might lose all awareness of his own strength and inflict an irreparable injury upon her.

Her emotions were mixed, strange, verging on utter panic in that awful moment of smothering proximity, when his body seemed like a rod of steel bruising her from knee to shoulder and threatening to turn into a steel trap with cruel jaws which might snap shut at any moment, shattering the very bones of her body.

She began to kick and moan, to beat with her fists on his shoulders. And then she was screaming at him, demanding that he release her, increasing with an energy she hardly knew that she possessed the frenzy of her twistings and turnings.

How she ever managed to reach down and get a firm grip on her right slipper and wrench it off she never quite knew. Only that she had the slipper in her hand suddenly and was beating him on the face with it, hitting him on the side of his face with the high heel as hard as she could, and then across his forehead and not even stopping when he cried out and slapped her on the face with the flat of his hand.

She struck at him again and again, not caring if she hurt him severely, because he was still refusing to release her and the slap had turned her into a wild woman. Some instinct, some lingering trace of sanity or compassion, prevented her from striking him across the eyes. But she didn't stop hitting him even when she saw a bright splotch of blood leap out on his right temple.

When the pressure of his arms fell away and went staggering back from her she tossed the slipper into a corner of the room, snatched up the cocktail from the center table--he'd set the tray down before seizing hold of her--and emptied the glass in his face.

The liquor splashed across the right side of his face, wetting his hair and running down his cheek, dissolving the blood. It drenched both lapels of his dinner jacket and gave him an almost clownish look, for his face remained faintly red-streaked, and he kept swaying for a moment, with a sickly grimace on his face.

He closed his eyes and blinked twice furiously and when he opened them again the grimace was gone. Hot anger flamed in his eyes instead. But he didn't advance upon her and slap her again. He simply stood very still, glaring at her.

"All right," he said. "Maybe you'd better go. I was a fool to think I could reach you in any way. What did you think I was going to do--ravish you? Sure, sure, I know. I was a little rough. But I'm not an eighteen-year-old kid. I'm thirty-four and when two people are in love--or are supposed to have been in love and one of the partners still thinks along those lines, and hasn't forgotten the other times when the big, important part has been welcomed and has meant something--you let yourself get dizzy with longing and you don't think you'll be mistaken for the kind of brute no woman would trust herself alone with in a hotel lobby when the doorman's back is turned. Not for more than ten or twelve seconds anyway."

"You shouldn't have torn my clothes off," she said, swaying a little herself now, feeling sick inside.

"Oh, so I tore your clothes off. When will you outgrow that exaggerating tendency of yours? You asked me to tear your blouse off once, remember? You said: 'If I was wearing a dress, darling, I'd ask you to unzipper me down the back. But just this flimsy blouse--Darling, will you think me shameless if I ask you to tear it off. I'd like to hear the silk rip, under your big, strong hands.'"

A hot flush suffused her cheeks. "I never said anything of the sort. You're putting the words of a wanton into my mouth."

"No, I sincerely don't believe so. You may not have used those exact words, but it's practically what you did say. And I didn't think you a wanton. I loved and respected you and--I still do, I guess. But it's hopeless. I realize that now. There is a streak of prudery in you you'll never overcome. And when you add jealousy to it--"

"Do you dare stand there and tell me you don't think I had a right to feel jealous, after the way you carried on with Lathrup tonight?"

He shook his head. "No, you had every right. But I told you I was sorry ... damned sorry and ashamed of myself ... and I meant every word of it. Jealousy can be flattering to a man. Some men don't like it at all, but others do. I always have. It's the surest sign there is that a man means something to a woman, that she really loves him. And real love is too precious a commodity for a man to take the other attitude--that jealousy is an annoyance and justifies anger or resentment. But there's one kind of jealousy no man likes, unless there's something wrong with him--unless he's a masochist and enjoys torturing himself. It's the kind that won't listen to reason, that makes no allowances for the fact that a man can look at another attractive woman without bringing the world toppling down about his ears. Or even hold her a little too tightly on a dance floor and kiss her once or twice."

"Once or twice would have been quite all right with me. But the kind of kiss--"

"All right. We've had a violent quarrel and you've hit me as hard as you could with the heel of a shoe--and that ought to even things up. Now I'm afraid it's goodbye. I'll always love you, I guess, but I've never been a glutton for punishment."

"You went very far tonight--with Lathrup and what you call slightly rough love-making. You went a hell of a long way."

"All right, I won't deny it. So it's hopeless, isn't it? We both agree about that."

"Yes," she said, speaking very slowly and carefully, emphasizing each word, but her heart felt dead within her. "We both agree."

Even though Ruth Porges dressed severely enough in the office she had always--unlike Lathrup--had a liking for mink. An entire coat she could not have afforded, but her mink stole was a very capacious and expensive one. She removed it from the back of the chair where she had tossed it on entering Roger's apartment and draped it carefully over her shoulders. It concealed almost all of the torn parts of her dress. A mink stole in July was an affectation but tonight she was grateful that she had succumbed to the impulse to appear at the nightclub with a fur piece draped over her arm.

She stopped by the door for an instant, bending to put on her slipper. She wondered if, on arriving home, she would find the tip caked with dried blood. She hoped she wouldn't. It might have made her break down and sob half the night. She'd have to remember to take a Miltown on retiring. There was another tranquilizer she was thinking of switching to. It was a little stronger, but quite harmless, really. As harmless as the memory of Roger would be a year from now. Every woman was entitled to at least one mistake in her choice of a man, and, having started late, she was well ahead in that respect.

She walked out into the entrance hall without a backward glance, opened the front door and shut it very firmly behind her. She was glad that Roger had not offered to see her to the elevator or to accompany her to the street and put her into a taxi. She had a great many things to be grateful for.

And she wished--she wished that she were dead.

* * * * *

It was six days after Helen Lathrup had been found slain in her office by Lynn Prentiss that Ruth Porges found the murder weapon. She stumbled upon it by pure accident, in a place where the police hadn't looked and would scarcely have thought of looking.

That she found it at all was due to one of those almost unbelievable blind flukes which fiction writers prefer to shun, but which persist in occurring, with surprising frequency, in real life.

She not only found the weapon--a black metal, long-barreled forty-eight calibre pistol equipped with a silencer--but she knew immediately who the owner of the gun was, precisely when and how it had come into his possession, and hence, by inference, who the murderer had to be. Unless, of course, someone who was not the murderer had loaned the gun to someone else. And that seemed unlikely, since a man or woman owning such a gun would know exactly how it had been used and would have gone immediately to the police and cleared himself of all suspicion by naming the borrower and explaining the circumstances under which he had allowed himself to be made an unwitting dupe to the one crime in which a taste for silence could lead straight to the electric chair.

Ruth Porges found the gun in a sixty-foot-deep excavation. In New York City, there are many scenic beauties and intricate works of engineering construction which can be said to be typical of the city as a whole. Every city has them, of course, but some cities are famous for their numerous bridges and reservoirs, or high stately office buildings, or parks and playgrounds, or triple-laned speedways, or museums and schools. New York, Pittsburgh, Chicago and San Francisco all shine in that respect, along with perhaps fifty other cities from coast to coast.

New York is a city of bridges, of course, the most beautiful bridges in the world, if you're willing to waive the Golden Gate. It is also a city of equally beautiful parks and its cluster of tall buildings is second to none. But New York, in recent years, and perhaps more than any other city in the throes of a refurbishing and a reconstruction, of a tearing down and a putting up, is a city of excavations.

Everywhere there are excavations, three or four blocks apart, deep and yawning and carefully encircled by board fences to keep absent-minded people from falling into them in the dark or even in broad daylight. Some are one hundred percent walled in and others are open a little on one side and are hence a menace to the unwary and should painstakingly be avoided if one does not wish to die.

If one does not wish to die! But if the psychologists and the psychiatrists are to be believed, there are a great many people in every large city who wish to die. People on the run, thieves and murderers, wanted by the law, hiding out from day to day in dismal furnished rooms and never knowing when the blow will fall, a knock on the door, a voice demanding: "Open up, Buster--or we'll start shooting through the door!"

Death, blood, a corpse on a mortuary slab. Violence and the aftermath of violence--a grieving widow, fatherless kids, for a cop could die too, and the law and its defiers were tragically intertwined.

The only real difference was, a cop or any reasonably normal person didn't want to die. They wanted to go on living as long as they could. It was the guilt-ridden, the guilt-tormented, who wanted to die. They didn't know it, but they did. To beat their brains out against a stone wall was one kind of temptation to them--a gun, a knife, a noose another. To hang themselves was perhaps best of all, to their distorted way of thinking. But everything that invited death through a lack of foresight, a careless misstep, a needless risk was attractive to them--including a yawning excavation between two towering office buildings on a city street, only four-fifths boarded up.

But when Ruth Porges passed the excavation on her way to work, at nine in the morning, she wasn't thinking of the guilt-ridden alone and how appealing a leap downward through a gap in the boarding might have seemed to some of them. The idea crossed her mind, curiously enough, but only for an instant and then her thoughts went off on another track.

How easy it was to put a quick end to your life if you really wanted to. You didn't even have to go to the top of a tall building and jump. You just had to be a little careless in crossing the street between the early morning traffic--any day in the week.

True, you might be horribly injured and suffer pain and it certainly wasn't the best way. But it _was_ a way, and a very simple one. Not that it would have appealed to her even if her morbid, half-despairing mood of several months ago had failed to depart, leaving only the ugly scar that she was determined to keep from opening again. Lathrup's tragic death had shaken and sobered her, making her realize how uncertain any kind of happiness was and that wanting to die was a very bad thing, because you never knew when it would be your turn to find happiness for a month or a year.

To keep from remembering the shocking, horrible morning in the office six days before, with the police making it harder for everyone, driving Susan to the verge of hysteria and making Lynn Prentiss bite her nails and look so pale that she expected the girl would faint at any moment and Eaton himself bristle like a porcupine and then look worried and a little frightened, as if losing his business partner and most important editorial wheel--big wheel Lathrup, who specialized in messing up the lives of people of no particular importance to her--might cut heavily into his two-hundred-thousand-a-year-income. How could he hope to replace her, unless he applied to some very high-class employment agency for some exceptionally brilliant call girl who could step right in and take over where Lathrup had left off.

To keep her mind off that kind of bitterness she looked straight down into the excavation where it wasn't boarded over and a wave of dizziness swept over her. Sixty feet wasn't a long drop, but it gave her much the same sensation as standing on the roof of a fairly tall building and staring down into the street below would have done. She had a fear of heights, but there was a fascination in it too.

She was still standing there, leaning a little forward, when she felt the chain at her neck break and saw the locket go spinning downward, a flash of gold in the bright morning sunlight. She saw it strike the torn-up earth far below and rebound and come to rest in a deep crevice a foot or two from the base of the incline.

She cursed softly under her breath, reproaching herself for letting the locket dangle on so fragile a chain and then craning her neck unthinkingly. She'd been intending to have a heavier chain put on the locket for months. It was the most fragile kind of chain, as thin as a thread almost, the links so tiny you could barely see them with the naked eye.

And the locket was valuable, an heirloom. She couldn't afford to wait until the construction gang arrived at nine-thirty or ten and work started up in the pit. If she told one of the men or even the construction boss that there was a solid gold locket just waiting to be picked up down there her chances of ever seeing it again wouldn't be too good. She might and she might not ... get it back. Honesty was an intangible in a situation like that, and the locket meant too much to her to weigh the chances pro and con.

She'd have to climb down and recover it herself. Could she? Of course she could. The incline wasn't steep enough to prevent her from descending all the way to the bottom, if she moved with care and didn't start an earthslide.

She looked up and down the street, feeling a little self-conscious about it, knowing how foolish she'd look if anyone from the office saw her. Macklin especially, with his slow, good-natured grin, which could, on occasion, convey more than a hint of mockery. The excavation was only three buildings away from the Eaton-Lathrup offices and she'd probably be seen by someone she knew before she was back on the street again. But to heck with that. She just couldn't afford to lose that locket.

It was an act of folly to even hesitate. She climbed resolutely under the rope which stretched between the break in the boarding and started downward, leaning a little backwards and being very careful not to dislodge any of the small stones embedded in the gravel.