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“I love him. And I’m never going to divorce him—never.”
    “And what if he doesn’t love you?”
    “Love me?” She laughed. “Of course he doesn’t love me. He hates me. He hates me because he knows he owes everything to me. He knows I called his bluff. I gave him everything a writer could want, he couldn’t write. I gave him everything a man could want, and he flunked that too. I made him see himself for what he is, a sham, an emptiness—a nothing.”
    “Such language about the man you love.”
    “Why shouldn’t I say it? It’s true. And it doesn’t make any difference. He’s mine. He belongs to me. I’m going to get him back.”
    I lit a cigarette, my head aching faintly. “Okay. You’re going to get him back. But why bother to tell me about it?”
    “Because I want you to know. You see, I have a plan. It’ll work. I’ll get Martin back. Then you’ll have Iris again.”
    “Thank you.”
    “You do want her, don’t you?” She leaned toward me again over the coffee table, her eyes hungry. “Maybe you don’t. Maybe you feel the way I feel, that a woman like that doesn’t deserve to—”
    “Let’s not talk about Iris. You’ve got a plan. Tell me your plan.”
    I knew pretty much what it was, of course. I had no plan myself, just to let her talk and see which way the wind lay. I didn’t like anything about it. Not so much what she was saying, but the aura around her. They had always said she was dangerous, and the danger was as evident as a perfume or a scarf knotted at her tiny neck. I couldn’t analyze it. I just knew that her reactions were unstable, not like reactions I knew. She was unpredictable—and desperate.
    “It’s something they did,” she said. She wore a heavy silver bracelet on her left wrist. As she moved, it clattered. “He and Marietta. Marietta’s his sister. You know that?”
    I nodded.
    “Marietta’s worse than he is. She’s bad, really bad. And they were so nastily close. She was his evil genius, really.” Her lips curled in a smile of remembered satisfaction. “At least I managed to break that up.”
    “And how did you do it?” I asked casually. I didn’t want her to think I was interested in Marietta one way or the other.
    “By telling him the truth about her.”
    “And the truth about Marietta?”
    Her tiny hand plucked the cigarette stub out of the holder and tossed it into an ash tray. “That she’s a bum.” She giggled. It sounded like water dribbling from a leaky faucet. “He wouldn’t believe it at first, not until I showed him some of the men she’d made fools out of, made him see it had to be true. And he hates her now. It’s all vanity. He thought he was the only man for her. He couldn’t abide thinking of his sister playing hooky from worshiping at his shrine. He couldn’t bear to think that all the time she’d been even worse than him—just a tramp.”
    I thought of Marietta’s cool, snowbound beauty. I thought of Marietta never getting to the top of the cowslip hill. I thought of the citrus-grower from Southern California with the big, self-confident hands and the gun.
    “It’s something they did,” she said again. Her left hand, with the ponderous bracelet sagging at the bird wrist, was clutching her tucked-in legs so that she was in a small, tight ball on the couch. “Something with a tourist in Taxco. Before our marriage. The police thought it was a guide. They were never sure. But I know. I can break it to the police. I can get them both jailed. I have proof.”
    She was always talking about having proof. I had a vision of her ceaselessly pattering around, the doll nose poking out from under the canopy of hair, peering in closets, scurrying through desks, finding proof against other people. I wondered, vaguely, if she was telling the truth, if Martin was really a shoddy crook. Not that it mattered. Iris would have stuck to him if he’d murdered his mother.
    “And I told him,” she was saying. “I told her