Chapter 16
The next day Melinda was still sleeping when Vic came home for lunch. He knew she had been up very late the night before, because he had seen the glow of her bedroom light on the back lawn when he turned out his own light at two-thirty. When he came home at seven that evening, she had still not taken the edge off her hangover, though she said she had slept until three. Vic had two things to tell her, one pleasant and one perhaps not so pleasant, so he told her the first one before dinner, when her hangover seemed to be at its worst, hoping it might make her feel better.
"You can be sure," he said, "that I'm not going to mention this detective episode to Horace or Phil or anybody else. So if Wilson and Ralph can keep their mouths shut, and they have every reason to, nobody needs know about it. Does anybody else know about it?" he asked with concern, as if he were on her side.
"No," she groaned, completely vulnerable in her hour of suffering.
"I thought it might make you feel better if I told you that," Vic said.
"Thanks," she said indifferently.
His shoulders moved in an involuntary shrug. But she was not looking at him. "By the way, I had a letter from Brian Ryder today. He's going to come up the third week in November. I told him he could stay with us. It'll be for two nights, three at the most. We've got a lot of work to do in the office, so we won't be here much." After a moment, when she had made no sign that she had heard, as if the words had penetrated about as little as they would have penetrated the ears of a person asleep, he added, feeling rather odd and as if he were talking to himself, "I'm sure from his letters he's a very civilized young man. He's only twenty-four."
"I don't suppose you'd fix me another drink?" she said,
extending her empty glass toward him, though she still stared at the floor.
She ate a good dinner that evening. She could always eat with a hangover, and besides it was one of her theories that the more you ate with a hangover the better you felt. "Nail it down," was her remedy. After dinner she felt well enough to take a look at the evening paper. Vic put Trixie to bed, then came back and sat down in the armchair.
"Melinda, I have a question to ask you," he began.
"What?" She looked at him over the paper.
"Would you like a divorce from me? If I gave you a very good income to live on?"
She stared at him for perhaps five seconds. "No," she said firmly, and rather angrily.
"But what's this all coming to?" he asked, opening his hands, and feeling suddenly the soul of logic. "You hate me. You treat me as an enemy. You get a detective after me—"
"Because you killed Charley. You know it as sure as you're sitting there."
"Darling, I just didn't. Now come to your senses."
"Everybody 'knows' you did it!"
"Who?"
"Don Wilson knows it. Harold thinks so. Ralph knows it." "Why don't they prove it?" he asked gently.
"Give them time. They'll prove it. Or 'I' will," she said, sitting forward on the sofa, reaching abruptly for her pack of cigarettes on the cocktail table.
"How, I'd like to know. There's such a thing as framing a man, of course." He said musingly, "I suppose it's a little late. Say, why doesn't Don Wilson or Carpenter subject me to a lie detector? Not that they have any legal power to, however."
"Harold said you wouldn't even react to it," she said. "He thinks you're cracked."
"And the crack shall make you free."
"Don't be funny, Vic."
"Sorry. I wasn't trying to be funny. To get back to what I asked you before, I'll give you anything but Trixie, if you want to divorce me. Think of what it means. You'll have money to do what you want with, money to see the people you want to see. You'll be absolutely free of responsibility, free of responsibility for a child and for a husband. Think of the fun you could have."
She was chewing her underlip as if his words tortured her perhaps with temptation. "I'm not finished with you yet. I'd like to destroy you, I'd like to smash you."
He opened his hands again, lightly: "It's been done. There's always arsenic in the soup. But my taste buds are pretty good. Then there's—"
"I didn't mean kill you. You're 'so—nuts', I don't suppose you'd mind 'that' very much. I'd like to smash your lousy ego!"
"Haven't you? Darling, what more could you do than what you've been doing? What do you think I'm living on?" "Ego."
A laugh bubbled up in him, and then he was serious again. "No, not ego. Just the pieces of myself that I can put together again and hold together—by force of will. Will power, if you like, that's what I live on, but not ego. How could I possibly have any?" he finished desperately, enjoying the discussion immensely and also enjoying the sound of his own voice, which seemed to be objective, like his own voice on a tape-recording machine being played back to him. He was also aware of the Thespian tone he had assumed, making his words a combination of distilled
