Wife or Death Read Free

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