The nasty man smiled at me, nastily. “I’ll come to that,” he said.
“You entered this house,” I reminded him, “under the guise of taking some sort of survey. Yet you ask me no questions at all about my television viewing habits. On the contrary, you promptly begin to make comments about my personal life. I think it more than likely that you are a fraud.”
“Ah, madam,” he said, with that nasty smile of his, under that nasty little mustache, “of course I’m a fraud. Aren’t we all frauds, each in his — or her — own way?”
“I think,” I said, as icily as possible, “it would be best if you were to leave. At once.”
He made no move to get up from the sofa. In fact, he even spread out a bit more than before, acting as though at any instant he might kick off his shoes and take a nap. “If your husband,” he said lazily, “were to discover another man making love to you, there’s no doubt in my mind that Mr. Carroll would shoot the other man on the spot.”
Once again I had no choice but to agree, since Robert had more than once said the same thing to me, waving that great big pistol of his around and shouting, “If I ever see another man so much as kiss you, I’ll blow his brains out, I swear I will!”
Still, that was my cross to bear, and hardly a subject for idle chatter with perfect strangers who had sailed into my living room under false colors, and I said as much. “I don’t know where you got your information,” I went on, “and I don’t care. Nor do I care to discuss my private life with you. If you do not leave, I shall telephone the police at once.”
The nasty man smiled his nasty smile and said, “I don’t think you’ll call the police, Mrs. Carroll. You aren’t a stupid woman. I think you realize by now I’m here for a reason, and I think you’d like to know what that reason is. Am I right?”
He was right to an extent, to the extent that I had the uneasy feeling he knew even more about my private life than he’d already mentioned, possibly even more than Robert knew, but I was hardly anxious to hear him say the words that would confirm my suspicions, so I told him, “I find it unlikely that you could have anything to say to me that would interest me in the slightest.”
“I haven’t bored you so far,” he said, with a sudden crispness in his tone, and I saw that the indolent way he had of lounging on my sofa was pure pretense, that underneath he was sharp and hard and very self-aware. But this glimpse of his interior was as brief as it was startling; he slouched at once back into that infuriating pose of idleness and said, “Your husband carries that revolver of his everywhere, doesn’t he? A Colt Cobra, isn’t it? Thirty-eight caliber. Quite a fierce little gun.”
“My husband is in the jewelry business,” I said. “He very frequently carries on his person valuable gems or large amounts of money. He has a permit for the gun, because of the business he’s in.”
“Yes, indeed, I know all that.” He looked around admiringly and said, “And he does very well at it, too, doesn’t he?”
“You are beginning to bore me,” I said, and half-turned away. “I believe I’ll call the police now.”
Quietly, the nasty man said, “Poor William.”
I stopped. I turned around. I said, “What was that?”
“No longer bored?” Under the miserable mustache, he smiled once again his nasty smile.
I said, “Explain yourself!”
“You mean, why did I say, ‘Poor William’? I was merely thinking about what would happen to William if a Colt Cobra were pointed at him, and the trigger pulled, and a thirty-eight caliber bullet were to crash through his body.”
I suddenly felt faint. I took three steps to the left and rested my hands on the back of a chair. “What’s his last name?” I demanded, though the demand was somewhat nullified by the tremor in my voice. “William who?”
He looked at me, and again he gave me a glimpse of the steel within. He said, “Shall I really say the name, Mrs. Carroll? Is there more than one William in your life?”
“There are no Williams in my life,” I said, but despairingly, knowing now that this nasty man knew everything. But how? How?
“Then I must say the name,” he said. “William Car—”
“Stop!”
He smiled. His teeth were very even and very white and very sparkly. I hated them. He said softly, “Won’t you sit down, Mrs. Carroll? You seem a bit pale.”
I moved around the chair I’d been holding for support, and settled into it, rather heavily and gracelessly. I said, “I don’t know when my husband will be home, he could be—”
“I do,” he said briskly. “Not before one-fifteen. He has appointments till one, and it’s at least a fifteen minute drive here from his last appointment.” He flickered back to indolence, saying lazily, “I come well prepared, you see, Mrs. Carroll.”
“So I see.”
“You are beginning,” he said, “to wonder what on Earth it is that I want. I seem to know so very much about you, and so far I have shown no interest in doing anything but talk. Isn’t that odd?”
From the alert and mocking expression on his face, I knew he required an answer, and so I said, “I suppose you can do what you want. It’s your party.”
“So it is. Mrs. Carroll, would you like to see your good friend William dead? Murdered? Shot down in cold blood?”
My own blood ran cold at the thought of it. William! My love! In all this bleak and brutal world, only one touch of tenderness, of beauty, of hope do I see, and that is William. If it weren’t for those stolen moments with William, how could I go on another minute with Robert?
If only it were William who was rich, rather than Robert. But William was poor, pitifully poor, and as he was a poet, it was unlikely he would ever be anything but poor. And as for me, I admit that I was spoiled, that the thought of giving up the comforts and luxuries which Robert’s money could bring me made me blanch just as much as the thought of giving up William. I needed them both in equal urgency; William’s love and Robert’s money.
The nasty man, having waited in vain for me to answer his rhetorical question, at last said, “I can see you would not like it. William is important to you.”
“Yes,” I said, or whispered, unable to keep from confessing it. “Oh, yes, he is.”
Until William, I had thought that all men were beasts. My mother — bless her soul — had said constantly that all men were beasts, all through my adolescence, after my father disappeared, and I had come to maturity firmly believing that she was right. I had married Robert even though I’d known he was a beast, but simply because I had believed there was no choice in the matter, that one married a beast or one didn’t marry at all. And Robert did have the advantage of being rich.
But now I had found William, and I had found true love, and I had learned what my mother never knew; that not all men are beasts. Almost all, yes, but not entirely all. Here and there one can find the beautiful exception. Like William. But not, obviously, like this nasty man in front of me. I would have needed none of my mother’s training to know that this man was a beast. Perhaps, in his own cunning way, an even worse beast than brutal and blustering Robert. Perhaps, in his own way, even more dangerous.
I said, “What is it you want from me?”
“Oh, my dear lady,” he protested, “I want from you? Not a thing, I assure you. It is what you want from me.”
I stared at him. I said, “I don’t understand. What could I possibly want from you?”
As quickly as a striking snake, his hand slid within his jacket, slid out again with a long blank white envelope, and flipped it through the air to land in my lap. “These,” he said. “Take a look at them.”