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embarrassed. The magic of the night was gone. Even Lou’s voice was different. I could sense the strain in it. I swung a chair away from the wall and straddled it, facing the bed.
    Lou looked through her hair at me. Suspiciously. “Now what?”
    My head ached. My throat felt constricted. The pound of my heart was making my white skivy jump. “Thanks. Thanks a lot for everything, Lou,” I said. “It was quite a birthday present. But tell me one thing, will you?”
    Lou lifted her hair away from her face with the back of one wrist. She had trouble meeting my eyes. “What?”
    “Who paid you how much to check in here with me?”
    Lou ran a pink tongue between her lips. Her voice was so low I could barely hear it. “That’s a hell of a thing,” she said, “to say to me.”
    “But it’s true?”
    Lou spread the sheet over her lap. “Get out of here,” she said. “Goddamn it. You hear me? Get out of here, Jim Charters.” Her eyes filled with tears and spilled over. “You think I
like
to feel like a whore?”
    I finished dressing and left the room. Without even looking back at her. Making certain the brown manila envelope was safe in my coat pocket.
    I was in something up to my neck.
    Lou was frightened, too.
    Of whom?

5
    THE day had been long and hot. Approaching night was doing little to dispel the heat. Gwen Shelly was watering her petunias as I put the car in the porte. There was a wet, pleasant smell of growing things.
    I thought at first Gwen wasn’t going to speak. Finally, she did. “Hey, you, Jim,” she called good-naturedly. “I’ve got a bone to pick with you. The next time you give us as a reference, tell the guy to call before midnight, will you? Bob and I had been in bed two hours when Mr. Mantin called last night.”
    “I’ll do that, Gwen,” I said. I was almost afraid to ask. “But I hope you gave me a good send-off.”
    Gwen bobbed her head. “We did that, Jim. We told him you were one swell guy.”
    I said, “Thanks a lot, Gwen.” Feeling, if possible, even more like a heel.
    May hadn’t forgotten my birthday. She’d invited the whole gang in. That was why she’d had liver for supper. That was why she hadn’t said anything about it being my birthday. The refrigerator was crammed with sandwiches she’d spent all day making. The cake had been next door at Gwen’s. May had wanted to surprise me. That’s why she’d stopped me when I’d nuzzled her. She hadn’t wanted the whole gang to walk in and catch us proving how much we loved each other.
    And what had I done? I’d gotten drunk and in a mess and checked into a hotel with a girl. But at least May knew everything now. That is, with the exception of Lou. I hadn’t had the guts to tell her about Lou.
    I walked up on the breezeway. There was a smug hominess about the whole set-up that I’d never really appreciated. So the house was small. So it was GI. It was ours. After a day spent fighting shadows, it was something real and solid.
    May was in the kitchen, her face flushed from the heat of the stove. There was a smudge of flour on her nose. May was twice as pretty, May had twice as nice a figure as the distant green pasture in which I had rolled like a hog. And, too, she was twice as nice.
    She looked up from the biscuits she was cutting. Her eyes were worried. “No luck, sweetheart?”
    I hung my hat on the back of a chair. “Not so far. Most of the places on the beach were closed or the day barmen didn’t know the guy. But Mantin checked on me in half a dozen places. Gwen just said he called her and Bob last night.”
    May lifted her lips to be kissed. “Well, don’t worry so about it, sweetheart. We’ll locate him somehow and return the money. It isn’t as if it were a matter of life or death.”
    I wasn’t so certain about that. Men of Mantin’s type didn’t pass out ten thousand dollars lightly. They expected value in full for their money. The lump of ice in my stomach froze a little harder every time I thought