"I've told you," she said slowly, "I haven't finished with you yet. Why don't you divorce me? It'd be a lot safer for you. You certainly consider you've got grounds, don't you?" she said sarcastically, as if the grounds were illusory or as if he would have been a cad to use them.
"I never said I wanted to divorce you, did I? I'd feel—as if I were shirking my responsibility if I did. Besides, it isn't appropriate for a man to divorce his wife. She should divorce him. But what I've been getting at—this quarreling—"
"You haven't heard the end of it."
"That's what I mean. Must you reply to me in a belligerent tone?" His own tone was still sweet.
"You're right. I ought to save it for the final attack," she said just as belligerently.
Vic sighed. "Well, I take it the 'status quo' is still the 'status quo ante'. When are you going to have Ralph arid Wilson to the house? Bring them on. I can take them."
She stared at him, her green-brown eyes as cold and steady as a toad's.
"Have you nothing more to say?" he asked.
"I've said it."
"Then I think I shall retire." He stood up and smiled at her. "Good night. Pleasant dreams," he said, taking his pipe from the little table beside his armchair. Then he walked into the other world of the garage and his room.
Chapter 17
Don Wilson and his wife moved to Wesley in less than two weeks after Vic's encounter with him on the street. Once more Melinda gave her services as a house-finder, though in this case it was an apartment in Wesley. Vic saw it as a disorderly withdrawal. Wilson had been routed at the first brush. He had retreated for better cover, but now it was going to be difficult for him to keep that scowling eye on his enemy.
"What happened? Did people make it so unpleasant for him that he had to leave town?" Vic asked Melinda, knowing very well that was what had happened. Somehow, Vic supposed through Ralph, the story of the detective had leaked out. Ralph had perhaps fired a poorly aimed shot, telling people that Victor Van Allen had been tailed by a detective for five weeks just because he was so damned suspect, and Ralph's idea had probably been to arouse public opinion against Victor Van Allen if he could. But Vic's reputation had held. The repercussion was curious, as if a glass cannon ball had hit a stone wall and shattered into fragments, some of which had been picked up by the townspeople—pieces of a story out of which they could not make a whole. Who hired the detective, for instance? Some said Wilson himself—except that he hardly looked as if he had the money to do it. Others simply assumed the detective—if indeed he had existed, if the whole thing was not a made-up story—had been part of the police force and that some kind of routine investigation had been conducted very quietly at this time, a few weeks after the De Lisle incident. Horace knew the story better than any, but even he did not venture to say now, or venture to ask Vic, whether Melinda had hired the detective or not. Vic knew he suspected it, but it was as if this fact, if it was a fact, was simply too shameful to talk about, and would have been too painful for Vic to turn his mind to, and to answer "Yes" to, if Horace had asked him. Horace simply wore a pained expression these days.
Vic felt more cheerful and benign than ever. More and more Melinda was sullenly drunk. On one of her many dashes to Wesley to see Don Wilson she was arrested for speeding and also accused of drunken driving. She called Vic at his office from the police station in Wesley, and Vic hurried over. She was not very drunk, he saw, not drunk at all comparatively speaking, but the highway officer must have caught a whiff, or he deduced drunkenness from her probably foolhardy counterattack when he had stopped her. In the station Melinda was boldly asking for an alcoholic content test to be made of her breath. But there was no apparatus in the station for such a test.
"Well, you can see she's not drunk," Vic said to the police captain." I grant you she may have been speeding. I've known that to happen. I think you'd better handle the speeding part, Melinda, since I don't know what happened."
Vic brought to bear all the tact at his command, knowing that if Melinda had her license suspended for six months, all hell would break loose in the household. Melinda incarcerated would be most unpleasant. The police captain gave a lecture on the seriousness of driving while intoxicated, which Vic listened to with respect, knowing that a happy ending was coming. But Melinda broke in with, "I certainly haven't been guilty of drunken driving before, and I insist I'm not drunk now!" Her conviction had some effect on the captain, and so, of course, did the fact that he was Victor Van Allen, an esteemed resident of Little Wesley and the founder of the Greenspur Press. Or at least Vic thought that the middle-aged captain looked intelligent enough to have heard of the Greenspur Press and to
