`Go ahead.'
`Are you interested in Miss Drew? You know what I mean. Seriously.'
`I think I am. Why?'
`I don't know whether I should tell you this or not. She went out for breakfast with another man.'
`That's legitimate.'
`I don't know. I didn't actually see him but I heard his voice and I'm very good on voices. I think it was a married man.'
`How can you tell that from a man's voice?'
`It was Tommy's father,' she said. `Mr. Hillman.'
I sat down. For a minute I couldn't think of anything to say. The African masks on the sunlit wall seemed to be making faces at me.
Stella approached me with an anxious expression. `Shouldn't I have told you? Ordinarily I'm not a tattletale. I feel like a spy in her house.'
`You should have told me. But don't tell anyone else, please.'
`I won't.'
Having passed the information on to me, she seemed relieved.
`Did the two of them seem friendly, Stella?'
`Not exactly. I didn't see them together. I stayed in my room because I didn't want him to see me. She wasn't glad to have him come here, I could tell. But they did sound kind of intimate.'
`Just what do you mean by 'intimate'?'
She thought about her answer. `It was something about the way they talked, as if they were used to talking back and forth. There wasn't any politeness or formality.'
`What did they say to each other?'
`Do you want me to try and tell you word for word?'
`Exactly, from the moment he came to the door.'
`I didn't hear all of it. Anyway, when he came in, she said: 'I thought you had more discretion than this, Ralph.'
She called him Ralph. He said: 'Don't give me that. The situation is getting desperate.'
I don't know what he meant by that.'
`What do you think he meant?'
`Tommy and all, but there may have been more to it. They didn't say. He said: 'I thought I could expect a little sympathy from you.'
She said she was all out of sympathy, and he said she was a hard woman and then he did something - I think he tried to kiss her - and she said: 'Don't do that!' '
`Did she sound angry?'
Stella assumed a listening attitude and looked at the high ceiling. `Not so very. Just not interested. He said: 'You don't seem to like me very much.'
She said that the question was a complicated one and she didn't think now was the time to go into it, especially with somebody in the guest room, meaning me. He said: 'Why didn't you say so in the first place? Is it a man?'
After that they lowered their voices. I don't know what she told him. They went out for breakfast in a few minutes.'
`You have a very good memory,' I said.
She nodded, without self-consciousness. `It helps me in school, but in other ways it isn't so fabulous. I remember all the bad things along with the good things.'
`And the conversation you heard this morning was one of the bad things?'
`Yes, it was. It frightened me. I don't know why.'
It frightened me, too, to learn that Hillman might have been the faceless man with Susanna when she was twenty. In different degrees I cared about them both. They were people with enough feeling to be hurt, and enough complexity to do wrong. Susanna I cared about in ways I hadn't even begun to explore.
Now the case was taking hold of her skirt like the cogs of an automated machine that nobody knew how to stop. I have to admit that I wouldn't have stopped it even if I knew how. Which is the peculiar hell of being a pro.
`Let's see the note she left you.'
Stella fetched it from the kitchen, a penciled note scrawled on an interoffice memo form:
`Dear Stella: I am going out for breakfast and will be back soon. Help yourself to the contents of the refrig. S. Drew.'
`Did you have anything to eat?'
I said to Stella.
