"I haven't any theories," Joel said in a defensive tone.
Vic noticed a withdrawal, a fear, just in the way Mr. Nash was sitting on the bench now. Vic leaned back, raised and lowered his shaggy brown eyebrows, and blew his smoke out straight in front of him.
There was a silence.
Mr. Nash was turning over various remarks in his mind, Vic knew Vic even knew the kind of remark he would make.
"Considering he was a friend of yours," Joel began, just as Vic had known he would, "I don't think it's very funny of you to joke about his death."
"He wasn't a friend of mine."
"Of your wife's."
"A different matter, you'll admit."
Mr. Nash managed a nod. Then a sidewise smile. "I still think it's a pretty poor joke." He stood up.
"Sorry. Maybe I can do better next time. Oh, just a minute!" Joel Nash turned.
"Melinda doesn't know anything about this," Vic said, still coolly leaning back against the newel post. "I'd just as soon you didn't tell her."
Joel smiled and waved a hand as he walked away. The hand, was limp. Vic watched him walk to the other side of the living room, near Horace and Phil Cowan, who were talking together, but Joel did not try to join them. He stood by himself and took a cigarette. Mr. Nash would wake up in the morning still believing it was a joke, Vic thought, though he would be wondering a little, too, enough to ask a few people some questions as to what Vic Van Allen's attitude toward Malcolm McRae had been. And various people—Horace Meller, for instance, and even Melinda—would tell him that Vic and Mal had never hit it off very well. And the Cowans or Horace or Mary Meller, if pressed, would admit that they had noticed something between Mal and Melinda, nothing more than a little flirting, of course, but Malcolm McRae had been an advertising executive, not a very important one but there had been an obnoxious air of superiority and patronage about him. He had been the type women call fascinating and men generally loathe. Tall and lean and immaculate, with a long narrow face in which nothing stood out in Vic's memory except a large wart on his right cheek like Abraham Lincoln's, though his eyes were supposed to have been fascinating, too, Vic remembered. And he had been murdered, for no known reason, in his Manhattan apartment by an assailant the police had up to now failed to find. That was why Vic's story had made such an impression on Joel.
Vic relaxed still more against the newel post and stretched his legs out in front of him, recalling with a peculiar relish now how Mal had stood behind Melinda on the golf course with his arms around her, showing her how to make a shot that she could have done better than he if she had wanted to. And that other time, around three in the morning, when Melinda had coyly retreated to her bed with a glass of milk and had asked Mal to come in to talk to her. Vic had stubbornly sat on in the living room, pretending to read, determined to stay there no matter what time it got to be, so long as Mal was in her room. There was no comparison in their intellects, Mal's and Melinda's, and Mal would have been bored stiff if he had ever had her for half a day to himself. But there had been the little lure of sex. There was always Melinda's little come-on that went something like "Oh, Vic? I love him, truly I do, but just not in that way. Oh, it's been like this for years. He doesn't care for me that way either, so—" with the upturned, expectant, green-brown eyes. Mal had come out of Melinda's room after twenty minutes or so. Vic was sure there hadn't been anything between them, ever. But he remembered a certain satisfaction when he had heard that Mal had been killed last December. Or had it been January? And his first thought had been that Mal might have had it from a jealous husband.
For a few moments Vic imagined that Mal had come back to Melinda's room that night after he had gone to his room on the other side of the garage, that he had known about it, and that he had planned the murder meticulously, gone in to New York on some pretext, called on Mal with a sash weight under his coat (the murderer must have been a friend or an acquaintance, the papers had said, because Mal had evidently let him in quietly), and had battered Mal to death. Silently and efficiently, leaving no fingerprints—neither had the real murderer—then driving back to Little Wesley the same night, giving as an alibi, in case anybody had ever asked him for one, that he had been watching a movie in Grand Central at the time Mal had been murdered, a movie that he would actually have seen, of course, at some other time.
"Victor-r?" Mary Meller bent' down toward him. "What're you pondering?"
Vic slowly stood up, smiling. "Not a thing. You're looking very peachy tonight." He was referring to the color of her dress.
"Thank you. Can't we go and sit down in some corner and you talk to me about something?" Mary asked him. "I want to see you change your seat. You've been there all evening."
"The piano bench?" Vic suggested, because it was the only spot in sight where two people could sit next to each other. The dancing, for the moment, had stopped. He let Mary take him by the wrist and draw him toward the piano bench. He
