The Crimes of Jordan Wise

voices carry in a mostly empty room. When I heard Gavin use my name, I stopped and listened.

'You can't help but feel sorry for Laidlaw,' he was saying in his gossipy way. 'He doesn't know how much better off he is without that bitch. She—'

I was on the move by then, straight toward them. Horler spotted me first and jabbed Gavin with his knee. When Gavin saw me, his moon face warped in on itself as if squeezed from within. He squirmed visibly on his stool.

'Go ahead,' I said. 'Don't let me stop you.'

'Christ, Richard, I—'

'Let's hear the rest of it.'

Horler muttered an excuse and made a hasty exit. Gavin gulped his drink and started to get up, but I held him down with a hand on his shoulder. His eyes pleaded with me, as if he were a dog about to be kicked.

'I'm not going to make a scene,' I said. 'I'll just buy you a drink and we'll chat a little.'

'I don't blame you for being pissed—'

'I'm not pissed. What're you drinking?'

' . . . Scotch and soda.'

I ordered another round for him, a double shot of Arundel for myself. Then I said, 'What did you mean, I'm better off without that bitch?'

'I've got a big mouth,' he said. 'Robin says so, and she's usually right about my shortcomings.'

'What did you mean?'

'You don't really want to hear it.'

'Why is Annalise a bitch? Why am I better off?'

The drinks came and he slugged half of his. 'All right, you asked for it,' he said, not quite looking at me. 'She wasn't faithful to you. She . . . well, not for a long time.'

It was several seconds before I asked, 'How long a time?'

'At least six months.'

'How many men?'

'I'm not sure. Two that I know of.'

'The first?'

'Does it matter?'

'You, Gavin?'

'Christ! I don't play around. Never have, never will.'

'Who, then?'

'If I tell you . . . what're you going to do?'

'Nothing,' I said. What could I do that wouldn't call attention to me? 'I'm not the confrontational type. Or the violent type. I just need to know.'

I watched him struggle with it for half a minute. Then he said, 'Screw it, I don't owe him any favors,' and swallowed some of his fresh drink. 'Royce Verriker.'

Verriker. I felt a rush of hatred for him. Every man needs a vice; mine is making money. And making friends' wives.

'How do you know?'

'I saw him going into your house one afternoon,' Gavin said.

'When you were out and Maureen was away visiting in San Juan.'

'It could've been innocent.'

'It wasn't. I asked him about it later on and he owned up.'

'Just like that, he owned up?'

'You don't know Royce like I do. He's a shit when it conies to women. Likes to brag about his conquests. He never bragged to you?'

'No. But then he wouldn't, would he, if he was screwing Annalise.'

Gavin made the rest of his Scotch disappear. 'He's been like that ever since I've known him. Dozens of women—that divorce practice of his is tailor-made.'

'How long did it go on with him and Annalise?'

'A while. Until he met somebody new, I guess.'

'Does Maureen know what he is?'

'Hell, how could she not know? She either doesn't care or just turns a blind eye because she loves him.'

So that was the cause of the rift between her and Annalise, the reason they'd stopped being friends. Had Annalise felt any shame? Probably not. Did she feel any over running out on me? Probably not.

'Who else besides Verriker?' I asked him.

'Nobody you or I know. Some rich tourist from New York.'

'Name?'

'Jackson, Johnson, something like that. Manufacturer of women's clothing. Down here for the sport fishing, stayed at the old Grand.'

'How do you know about him?'

'It was right before she left you,' Gavin said. 'A week or so. By then she wasn't bothering to be discreet about it. Snuggling up to him in public, spent at least one night in his room while you were off on your cruise.'

'When did he go back north?'

'I can't tell you that. You'd have to ask at the hotel.' Pause. 'You think she ran off with him?'

Of course she'd run off with him. A women's clothing manufacturer from New York? She'd have sat naked on his lap on the plane for an opportunity like that.

Gavin said, 'Richard, man, you're not thinking of going after her and this guy? Trying to get her back?'

'No,' I said.

He seemed relieved. 'That's the right attitude. What you heard me say to Horler . . . well, it's a fact. You really are better off without her.'

He was right.

I had no doubt of it by then.

In an odd way, finding out the full scope of Annalise's betrayal made it easier for me to get on with my life. You might think that I hated her then, but I didn't. Nor did I have any love left. I felt nothing at all for her. It was as if someone who had once been very close to me had died, and I'd gone through a short period of bereavement, and then I was able to move ahead with no emotional baggage.

At first I tried to figure out how and where it had all gone wrong, if there was a turning point, any specific incident that had led to her betrayal. But of course there wasn't. It was a gradual thing. She had been right when she accused me of evolving back into Jordan Wise, but she'd been undergoing a metamorphosis of her own. We were two divergent life forms, changing in opposing ways—that was what had doomed our relationship. It wouldn't have mattered if I'd realized it along the way. I couldn't have stopped it. The deterioration, the decay, was inevitable.

I could see all this now with an objective eye, as if across a chasm. I understood Annalise as I never had before. And I understood myself, as an individual and in relation to her.

She'd given me a lot to be thankful for since that night in her apartment in San Francisco. Four years of greater passion and stimulation than I'd ever known. St. Thomas and the sea and sailing and Bone's friendship. But I hadn't given her all she'd wanted. She had never been content living here. Or content with me. From the first, I was a means to an end, a source of satisfaction for her cravings—an integral part of a package deal. If she'd ever felt love for me, even a little, it had been for that reason and that reason alone. That was why she'd stayed with me as long as she had.

Verriker had been a dalliance, a way to relieve the restless boredom. The New York clothing manufacturer had been a ready-to-wear excuse. When I refused to satisfy the most important of her hungers, a shot at the New York fashion world, she ran off with the first man who could offer it to her. She'd been gone a long time before she actually left.

What it boiled down to was that I couldn't have held on to her because I'd never really had her in the first place. That was what hurt the most. Even at the moments of our deepest connection, in and out of bed, she'd never