Read Pale Gray for Guilt for Free Online

red his face is! Let me guess. He'll be bald in five years."
    "Four," said Marilee firmly.
    "He needs glasses already and won't wear them," said Barni.
    "He's going to grow an enormous belly," Puss said. "And fall over dead of a massive coronary occlusion when he's forty-five."
    "And when he falls over, it will bust his cigar and spill his bourbon."
    "And some sorry wretched woman is married to him.
    Barni shook her head. "No girl who ever spent any time as a stewardess would ever marry one of those. Look at that mouth on it! Imagine having to actually kiss something like that and pretend you were enjoying itl"
    "And look at the dirty fingernails, will you!"
    ***
    When Buster-Buddy-Sonny reappeared in view, he was eighty feet up the dock, walking briskly and not swinging his arms at all.
    "You girls need your mouths washed out with gin," Mick said. "That was naughty."
    "A little friendly castration never hurt anybody," said Marilee.
    "Besides," said Puss, "we didn't touch on his really filthy habit. Given half a chance, do you know what that dreary bastard might do?"
    Marilee, with a dirty chuckle, leaned close to Puss and whispered to her. Puss shook her head and said, "Congratulations, sweetie. You must be leading a full life. But I meant something much worse than that."
    "Like what?" Barni asked, puzzled.
    "If you were ever stupid enough to let him get just a little bit past first base, that utter spook would stare right into your eyes and he would kind of gulp and look like a kicked dog and his voice would quiver and he'd say, 'Darlin', I love you.'"
    "He would! He would indeed!" cried Marilee. "The lowest of the low. He's the perfect type for it. A real rat-fink coward."
    Meyer came out of a long and somber contemplation, hunched like a hirsute Buddha, reached a slow ape arm and picked up his queen's bishop and plonked it down in what at first glance seemed like an idiotic place, right next to my center pawn. A round little lady who was one of his retinue that week beamed, clapped her hands and rattled off a long comment in German.
    "She says you give up now," said Meyer.
    "Never!" said I. I studied and studied and studied. Finally I put a knuckle against my king and tipped the poor fellow over and said, "Beach-walking, anyone?"
    But before Puss and I went over, I tried once again to reach Tush Bannon at his Boatel by phone. Once again there was no answer. I felt irritation and depression. And, perhaps, the first little needles of alarm.

Three
    I AWAKENED at six thirty Monday morning thinking about Tush and his problem. If I hadn't awakened with that idea in mind, I could have gone back to sleep. But it snapped my eyelids up and held them there. And big as the bed was, the custom job that had been aboard the Flush when I won her in Palm Beach, Puss Killian had left me in precarious balance on the edge. She was curled, her back to me, and there was a solid and immovable feel to the warm and shapely rear that pressed against the side of my hip. She was deeply recharging all her redheaded batteries, in the deep, slow intake and humming exhalation of sleep of the heaviest and best kind.
    So I gave up and got up and showered and came back, and tried to quietly get into a white sports shirt and khaki slacks. But in the muted light as I shoved my arm through the short sleeve I knocked a nightcap glass off the shelf and it smashed on the deck. She rolled, rose up slowly, glowered indignantly at me and settled back down into her sleep, nestling onto her other side, a long, tangled tassle of red hair falling across her cheek and mouth, stirring with each breath.
    I heard furtive galley sounds and found Barni Baker in a hip-length yellow robe, her hair in a kerchief, doing something to eggs. Her eyebrows went up when she saw me, and she whispered, "You fool. What's your excuse? Don't answer. It's rhetorical. It's criminal to have to talk in the morning. I found this here good-looking roe and these here good-looking eggs, and what