Wife or Death Read Free Page 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?”
    â€œOh, 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?”
    â€œFine,” Denton said without enthusiasm.
    â€œI 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