LITMIR.BIZ

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Then I stepped out on the narrow balcony into the sun, and stood leaning weakly against the terra cotta balustrade, looking down into the Truckee River, thinking—for the first time in the twenty years I’d known Judy’s mother—that she had a good and sufficient reason to be in a real state of collapse . . . whether she knew it or not.

      Then quite suddenly it dawned on me, standing there, why Judy hadn’t met me at the plane, why she’d had her friends meet me, why she’d been out riding when I got to the hotel. She’d left the paper, open and red-marked, where I’d have to see it, see it before I saw her . . . not knowing whether I knew all the gossip and rumor that was flying about or not. I felt a sharp sting of pity. What would she do—brazen it out? Or wasn’t there anything, really, to brazen out? Was it just that Clem Bonner was going back to the blonde girl he’d married his last year in Harvard, and she was letting him go? Or was it all something quite else? Was Polly Wagner right in thinking she was still desperately in love with Clem? And if so, did that explain Dex Cromwell . . . ?

      But chiefly—and I think, looking back on it, it’s what actually was worrying me more than anything else—what was Kaye Gorman, Clem’s first wife, doing in Reno? She’d divorced Clem there, but that had been almost four years before. And it couldn’t have been the climate that brought her back. It was hardly fit for anything but a salamander.

      I balanced my empty glass on the balcony rail and stared down on the flag-decked streets, sharp and objective there in the brilliant scorching sun. The air was as crystal-clear as the shallow swift-running water of the narrow river, and as heady as fine champagne. Ander the red and yellow and white and blue pennants strung over the streets, the people, dressed in Western clothes as unrestrained as the decorations, moved gaily, dodging in and out among cars parked at angles against the curbs. An old man on a pinto pony leading a procession of small children on ponies of varying sizes paraded solemnly down the middle of the street toward the Park. And somewhere in all this carnival town—The Biggest Little City in the World, the street sign said—was Judy Bonner.

      “Did you look in the bar?” the bell hop had asked. I glanced back at the array of half-empty bottles on the cocktail bar between the windows, and thought of that picture of Judy with the stack of chips at the roulette wheel, the man bending down over her, almost touching her bare shoulder.

      In the street below me a sudden appalling din rose over the crashing roar of the steam shovel in the River. A crowd collected around a big gray truck with bars like a jail, with horns honking and cowbells clattering uproariously. I saw a woman in white being hustled up the steps and inside the truck with several other women.

      “That’s the Kangaroo Court,” a voice near me said. “They put you in it and fine you a box at the rodeo, if you haven’t got something Western on.”

      I looked around. A man in well-cut riding breeches and a white shirt open at the neck was standing in the next little balcony, about ten feet from me.

      “Oh,” I said.

      “You’ve just come, haven’t you?”

      I nodded.

      “For the cure?”

      I looked blank.

      “That’s what they call getting a divorce,” he said, and I said “Oh” again.

      He laughed. He had several gold teeth that showed when he opened his mouth, and there was something about him—about his sun-tanned baldish head and about his eyes, the whites slightly bloodshot and the lower lids a little puffy, and about the way he looked at me, that wasn’t awfully attractive.

      “Did you come on the plane?” he asked.

      I nodded.

      “Well, let me give you a tip. Don’t trust anybody in this hole. They’re all out to get your money. That’s all they care about. Be careful of your lawyer’s wife, just for instance, if she invites you out to dinner and a little game. Don’t go—not if you don’t want to be taken for a couple of hundred before the evening’s over.”

      He flicked his cigarette into the air and watched it hit the water.

      “My name’s Ewing, Steve Ewing,” he said. “I’ll be glad to take you around till you know the ropes. I’m getting my divorce in a couple of weeks. I wouldn’t have come out here for it, but my wife and I haven’t lived together for eight years, so I just decided to get it over with quick. Let her marry him.”

      He shrugged.

      “I suppose you’re like all the rest—getting married again the minute you get your decree?”

      I swallowed. “I’m not getting—”

      “You’re wise, Mrs. Latham—very wise,” he said earnestly. I hadn’t had a chance to say I wasn’t getting a divorce, and I was so startled at his knowing my name that I didn’t try to correct him.

      He laughed again.

      “You see I know your name—I asked the elevator girl who you were.”

      He leaned over his balcony and fixed his eyes earnestly on mine.

      “You won’t believe it, little lady, but you’re the first woman I’ve seen out here that I wanted to look at twice.”

      He shrugged again.

      “I go around, of course. A man can’t just sit in his room all day. But I’m fed up with the girls you see here. Bar flies—nothing but bar flies. I’d given up, absolutely, till I saw you get out of the elevator just now. Do you know, that one minute changed my whole life?”

      I’m afraid I stared at him quite open-mouthed. He leaned closer over the pink terra cotta balustrade.

      “You won’t mind, will you, if I can’t help feeling sorry for your husband, poor devil—and glad there’s no lucky man I’ve got to start hating before I’ve ever seen him?”

      “Do be careful,” I said weakly. He was leaning at an alarming angle over the rail.

      “My dear, I’ve already fallen so hard a few hundred feet wouldn’t make the least difference.”

      If I’d ever thought that being a widow had taught me poise in such a situation, I was quite wrong. I simply stared at him. I had no way of realizing, of course, that this was a most harmless and naive example of how fast people work in Reno. They usually say it’s the altitude, and perhaps it is. I wouldn’t know.

      “Would you like another drink?” Mr. Ewing said. He was looking at the glass in my hand.

      “No, thanks,” I said hurriedly. “I’ve got to go unpack.”

      “Then I’ll see you in the lobby in . . . shall we say, half an hour?”

      He gave me what I imagine was intended for a seductive glance, and said, “Do you know, I’ve been looking for you all my life . . . and isn’t it strange I should find you in Reno, of all places?”

      “It certainly is,” I said. I staggered back into Judy’s sitting room and sank down on the gray-and-rose sofa, and put my glass on the floor.

      3

      “You’ll like it when you get used to it,” the doorman in the fancy dress had said. All I could think of was that if this certainly very startling thing had happened to me at the advanced age of thirty-eight, what must Judy Bonner have walked into—being twenty-two, and beautiful, and rich, and heralded by half-a-dozen nationally read columnists? Was this Dex Cromwell, I wondered, in his satin shirt and white Stetson, just a superior Steve Ewing she’d met in some bar?

      I glanced at the paper again, at the picture of Kaye Gorman—the smiling relict of a tobacco king, with all the rights, privileges and funds thereto pertaining. Where, I wondered, would she have known Dex Cromwell so well? His “Kaye, darling! You look like a million!” should really have been “a million and a third,” I thought suddenly . . . not knowing that in that thought the deadly virus of Reno had already infected

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