“Perfectly okay, Jan. Take your tune, honey.”
Janice Holton untied the kerchief and put it over her dark hair and fastened it under her chin. From her manner it was going to be a swift and silent trip.
“I guess what racked your husband up was having some person or persons unknown kill his girl friend.”
Out of the corner of my eye I could see that she had turned quickly and was staring at me. “I couldn’t care less what… racks him up, Mr. McGee. I feel sorry for the girl. As a matter of fact I regret never having had a chance to thank her.”
“Thank her?”
“For letting me out of bondage, let’s say.”
“Unlocked your chains?”
“You’re not really interested in the sordid details of my happy marriage, are you?”
“It just seemed like a strange way to put it.”
“I find myself saying some very strange things lately.”
“Right at the bottom of the certificate, Mrs. Holton, there’s the fine print that says you live happily ever after.”
I suppose that you could call it role-playing, maybe in the same sense that the psychologists who use group therapy use the term. Or you could call it, as Meyer does, my con-man instinct. Okay, call it a trace of chameleon blood. But the best way to relate to people is to fake their same hang-ups, and when you relate to people, you open them up. So I lie a little. Instant empathy. To crack her facade I had to make out like an ex-married, so I spoke with the maximum male bitterness.
“You sound like you had the tour too, Mr. McGee?”
“Ride the roily-coaster. Find your way through the fun house. Float through the tunnel of love. Sure. I had a carnival trip, Mrs. Holton. But the setup tends to do a pretty good job of gutting the husband. I believed the fine print. But she turned out to be a bum. So I end up paying her so much a month so she can keep on being a bum. So I’m a little bitter about the way the system works.”
“For a girl married to a lawyer, it doesn’t exactly work out that way. I believed the fine print too, Mr. McGee. I considered it an honorable estate, an honorable contract. And, by God, I worked at it. I knew after the first year it wasn’t going to be the way… you hope it will be. So I tried to understand him. I think Rick feels that he is… unworthy of being loved. So he can’t ever believe anyone loves him, really. So he has a thousand mean snide little ways of spoiling things. He loves the boys, I know. But any kind of… family ceremony, something for warmth and love and fun-oh, can he ever clobber everybody. Tears and shambles and nastiness, and everything you try to plan… birthdays, anniversaries, he has such a cruel way of making things turn sour. But I was stuck with it. I thought I was stuck with it. You know, if you’re a grownup, you add up the ledger. A successful man, a faithful man, not a drunk or a chaser. But then… the sneaky business with Miss Woertz changed the ledger.”
“And let you out of bondage?”
“Kept me from agonizing over… making the marriage work. Sort of… canceled all my vows.”
“Did you find out about her quite recently?”
“Oh, no. I found out practically as soon as it started. He started that crusade about finding out what really happened to Doctor Sherman. You know about that?”
“He told me about it. Was that just to help cover up the affair with the nurse?”
“Oh, no. He’s sincere about it. But when it threw them together, he sure put in a lot of hours in so-called investigation. Somebody called me up and told me about it, in a very nasty whisper. I couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman. I didn’t want to believe it, but I knew it was true, somehow. Then I saw all the little clues.” She gave a mirthless laugh. “The most convincing one was the way he became so much sweeter to me and the boys.”