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wild—but it didn’t change him. I like to think had he come to his senses that me and The Woman could have shook hands and just been friends and they could have gone back together, the way it was supposed to be. But he didn’t change. The alcohol had numbed his senses—a lot. But he knew something wasn’t right between me and him and him and her, even though he didn’t know it was what it was; he trusted us both too much for that. I could tell the way his beautiful eyes rested on me that he knew our friendship was washing up on the rocks, yet I’m certain he didn’t actually suspect me of such treachery as taking from him the thing he loved the most in the world, The Woman; well, that and his freedom, his desire to go back to the way things were. I think he might have been willing to share her, and maybe The Woman would even have gone for that—she was progressive, but it just didn’t occur to him that she needed him in her arms and in her bed. Like I said, that ole John Barley Corn had him by the nuts.
    I have wandered again. I was telling you about the red-headed man.
    You see, Red, as most people called him, never gave up on The Woman. One look at her and you would know why. She was a stunner, as I have said, but there was something else about her. It was—and this is going to sound like a cheap romance story—her soul; it reached out to you and embraced you. Corny as that sounds, I don’t know any other way to describe it. She was something. For Red, though, I think it was that he thought he had her locked down, and when the lock broke, he couldn’t accept it. Maybe if he had been the one to break it off he would have been fine. He was that kind of guy. Everything on his terms. Only thing was, The Big Guy wasn’t interested in terms. Red knew that any interference there would just lead to him having his head pulled off like a grape plucked from the vine, so he bided his time. When things fell apart for The Big Guy and The Woman, he was waiting, and I am certain (without actual evidence, I admit) he was the one who finally leaked the lion diddling event to the public. We were told at first it was destroyed. Another time were told it existed, but that it was lost, and finally that it was stolen. And then it showed up. I think Red bought it from someone, maybe the director who had gone into advertising. I can’t say. But he got his hands on it.
    That wasn’t what happened first, though. That wasn’t the first brick pulled from the pile. There were several. I guess I should have snapped to it, but I admit that I had been for the most part civilized and my instincts were not as sharply honed as they once were. Two or three times I thought I was being followed, and had noticed someone in the streets that I had seen twice earlier that day. New York is a big city, but people cross paths with one another now and again, so I didn’t think much of it. It wasn’t until The Woman and I had come back from a party, a little liquor-buzzed and hot to trot for the old bed room, when I smelled something. We had just come in through the door, and even though I was a bit drunk, and as I have said, civilized, something kicked in. I got a whiff of someone having been in our hotel room. Not a maid. I knew all their scents, and had had relations with several before me and The Woman took up together, and once or twice when she was out of town. This was the scent of a man with too much cologne. I peeled The Woman off of me, told her to wait, and sniffed about. My sniffing eventually led to a little camera fastened into a light fixture over our bed. Way it was rigged, when you turned on the light it came on and started snapping pictures, and when you turned it off, it still snapped for awhile. That way it had you in full light, and then, because our window always had the big curtains thrown back, and there were lights from the city resting on our bed, we could be easily photographed doing whatever we were doing, and frequently we