`You didn't buy me. You merely leased my services.'
They faced each other as implacably as two skulls. She said: `Did you have to palm her bastard off on me?'
`I wanted a son. I didn't plan it. It happened.'
`You made it happen. You connived to bring her baby into my house. You let me feed and nurture him and call him mine. How could you be such a living falsity?'
`Don't talk to me about falsity, Elaine. It seemed the best way to handle the problem.'
`Stallion,' she said. `Filth.'
I heard a faint movement in the adjoining room. Straining my eyes into the darkness, I could see Tom sitting on the bench in front of the grand piano. I was tempted to shut the door, but it was too late, really. He might as well hear it all.
Hillman said in a surprisingly calm voice: `I never could understand the Puritan mind, Ellie. You think a little fun in bed is the ultimate sin, worse than murder. Christ, I remember our wedding night. You'd have thought I was murdering you.'
`I wish you had.'
`I almost wish I had. You murdered Carol, didn't you, Ellie?'
`Of course I did. She phoned here Monday morning, after you left. Tom had given her his telephone number. I took the call in his room, and she spilled out everything. She said she had just caught on to her husband's plans, and she was afraid he would harm Tom, who wasn't really his son. I'm sure it was just an excuse she used to get her knife into me.'
`Her knife?' I said.
`That was a badly chosen image, wasn't it? I mean that she was glorying over me, annulling the whole meaning of my existence.'
`I think she was simply trying to save her son.'
`Her son, not mine. Her son and Ralph's. That was the point, don't you see? I felt as if she had killed me. I was just a fading ghost in the world, with only enough life left to strike back. Walking from where I left the Cadillac, I could feel the rain fall through me. I was no solider than the rain.
`Apparently her husband had caught her phoning me. He took her back to their cottage and beat her and left her unconscious on the floor. She was easy for me to kill. The knife slipped in and out. I hadn't realized how easy it would be.
`But the second time wasn't easy,' she said. `The knife caught in his ribs. I couldn't pull it out of him.'
Her voice was high and childish in complaint. The little girl behind her wrinkles had been caught in a malign world where even things no longer cooperated and even men could not be bought.
`Why did you have to stick it into him?' I said.
`He suspected that I killed Carol. He used Tom's number to call me and accuse me. Of course he wanted money.'
She spoke as if her possession of money had given her a special contemptuous insight into other people's hunger for it. `It would have gone on and on.'
It was going on and on. Tom came blinking out of the darkness. He looked around in pity and confusion. Elaine turned her face away from him, as if she had an unprepossessing disease.
The boy said to Hillman: `Why didn't you tell me? It could have made a difference.'
`It still can,' Hillman said with a hopefulness more grinding than despair. `Son?'
He moved toward Tom, who evaded his outstretched hands and left the room. Walking rather unsteadily, Hillman followed him. I could hear them mounting the stairs, on different levels, out of step.
Dick Leandro got up from his place, rather tentatively, as if he had been liberated from an obscure bondage. He went into the alcove, where I heard him making himself a drink.
Elaine Hillman was still thinking about money. `What about it, Mr. Archer? Can you be bought?'
Her voice was quite calm. The engines of her anger had run down.
`I can't be bought with anything you've offered.'
`Will you have mercy on me, then?'
`I don't have that much mercy.'
`I'm not asking for a great deal. Just let me sleep one more night in my own house.'
`What good would that do you?'
`This good. I'll be frank with you. I've been saving sleeping pills for a considerable time-'
`How long?'
`Nearly a year, actually. I've been in despair for at least that long-'
`You should have taken your pills sooner.'
`Before all this, you mean?'
She waved her hand at the empty room as if it was a tragic stage littered with corpses.
`Before all this,' I said.
