The Revengers Read Free Page B

at me. “I thought you knew Bob pretty well.”
    “Oh.”
    She laughed. There was a little malice in the sound, but not enough to be disturbing; she was not really sneering at, or hating, the dead.
    “Precisely, as Daddy would say. I gave him back something he’d lost. The coronary had undermined his confidence in himself, if you know what I mean. It really shook him very badly. He was afraid . . . afraid that since one important muscle had suddenly and inexplicably betrayed him, another might. I . . . I helped him determine that that did not seem to be happening at all. If you know what I mean.”
    I said carefully, “It’s my impression that the organ in question isn’t basically muscular, but I get the general idea.”
    She laughed again, a wry sound now. “And then, of course, having married him and made a new man of him, I assumed that he was m y new man entirely. But I was wrong. I mean, I don’t have to tell you he was a damned nice guy in many ways; but I don’t have to tell you, either, that he had a compulsive need to prove himself. In every way. And after the scare he’d had, it wasn’t enough, in the end, for him to prove himself to me. With me. He had to check it out elsewhere, too.”
    I slammed the trunk and joined her, suitcase in hand. “Um,” I said. “Like across the street?”
    Martha nodded. “And since she’s slept with my husband, naturally our suburban Lorelei over there wants a good reason for hating me so she doesn’t have to feel cheap and guilty about her little neighborhood affair. So bring your suitcase along like a good boy and show her what a promiscuous worthless bitch I am, beneath contempt really; a wanton young wench who hauls another man into the house almost before her husband’s cold in his grave.” She took my arm, leading me toward the front door. “Just relax. It won’t hurt a bit. You’re doing your good deed for the day, okay? You’re soothing the poor bruised conscience of Mrs. Roundheels back there; you’re making it easy for her to live with herself again after her reckless fling at passion with the wonderful, exciting, dangerous married man across the street whose young tramp of a wife never appreciated or deserved him. . . .” The door closed behind us. Martha’s voice stopped abruptly. After a moment she said in totally different tones, “Phew! How’s that for prattling vivaciously? You didn’t know I was a compulsive chatterbox, did you, Matt? Just leave your bag right there. How about a drink?”
    The inside of the house was pleasant enough if you didn’t take your interior decoration seriously. I mean, the furniture made no particular statement, it was simply comfortable-looking with a sprinkling of the heavy, dark, Mexican-style pieces that are nowadays produced on both sides of the border. There were some pretty good Indian rugs on the floor and some pretty standard prints on the walls, mixed up with a few original landscape paintings by our local artists specializing in aspens. I guess in New England it’s the birch with its gleaming white trunk; here in New Mexico it’s the aspen with its golden autumn foliage. Well, I’m old-fashioned enough, artistically speaking, to prefer a good aspen or birch to a bad cube or tetrahedron. Leaving my suitcase in the front hall, I followed Martha into the living room. There was a small bar of sorts in the comer. She gestured toward it.
    “Martini, right?” she asked, and when I nodded, she said, “Maybe you’d better make it yourself. I open a mean beer but I don’t guarantee my mixed drinks. And a little Scotch for me. I’ll get some ice.”
    Then we were sitting down with our drinks. It seemed as if I’d been going at a dead run ever since leaving Mac’s office, but of course it was nothing to what she’d just been through. From the massive Mexican armchair I watched her settling into a corner of the husky Mexican sofa, discarding her gracious-young-widow act like a used Kleenex, letting