the bait remains untouched. Absolutely nobody was ever going to know about Doris if I could help it. It would be too dangerous for both of us now.
I shook it off. Maybe I was mistaken, I thought. And it’s a small thing, anyway. I’m beginning to have the worry habit; that’s the trouble. Here I am, in the clear at last, on my way to Doris, with three thousand dollars in my pocket and an entirely new life ahead of us, and I insist on getting into a sweat about this thrill-chasing girl. By the time we get to Bayou City she’ll probably have decided I’m just another Mortimer Snerd and be interested in something else.
“This is a nice car,” I said, to change the subject and to keep the silence from stretching out.
“Yes,” she replied absently, as if it didn’t interest her much. “It rides nicely at a hundred and above. Why don’t you let it out?”
“On this road?” I asked incredulously.
She grinned. “Why not? It’s heavy.”
“So’s a granite headstone, but I don’t want one,” I said.
We came out onto the highway in a few minutes and I turned east onto, it, headed toward Colston and Bayou City. She lit two of those king-sized cigarettes she smoked and handed one to me. Almost unconsciously, the way a man always does when a woman lights a cigarette for him, I looked at the end of it before I put it in my mouth.
She rested her cheek against the back of the seat, smiling. “You’re not afraid of a little lipstick, are you?”
I grinned lamely. “No. I didn’t mean it that way. It was just a habit.”
“And,” she asked softly, “whose lipstick have you been avoiding?”
“Jesus, I don’t know,” I said, almost irritably. I wished we could get those bedroom overtones out of the conversation. “After all, I’ve been married for over four years.”
“But you’re not any more,” she said. “Your wife’s husband is dead. By the way, I hope you didn’t carry any life insurance. And not because I have anything against your widow.
“No,” I said. I knew what she meant, because I’d already thought about it. “It lapsed a long time ago. We needed a new car worse.”
“That’s good. For you, I mean. You can fool the police sometimes, but nobody ever got rich trying to make suckers out of those insurance investigators.”
Again she puzzled me. How did she know things like that? And how did she get that way? Was she convinced she was some sort of dilettante criminal, breaking laws for excitement? Or had she just been reading too many detective stories? I didn’t believe either one was true. There was too much education and native intelligence showing at times in between some of the crazy things she said.
Then she jarred me again. She could keep you off balance better than a professional fighter. “You don’t like obvious girls, do you? I should have known.”
“Why?” I asked, playing dumb again. “What do you mean?”
“You’re rather confusing to a girl. It’s because you look like one thing and are something else. You look like a football player or a professional fighter, but somewhere along the assembly line they got mixed up and gave you a mind that works. That’s what I mean I should have known. No moronic muscle man could ever have figured out all that mess the way you did.”
I was beginning to feel like a chump again. “If all this is a gag, Dinah, how about knocking it off?”
I glanced around at her. She took a long puff on the cigarette and stared back at me without the usual humor in her eyes. “It’s not a gag.”
“What is it, then?” I knew it was a stupid question, and one I shouldn’t have asked, but I couldn’t think of anything else.
“Well, since I’ve decided not to be obvious, I’ll be shameless. Or outright predatory. It’s not a gag, because I’m in dead earnest. You couldn’t give a girl a little help, could you?”
Lord, I should have taken the freight, I thought. This is a mess, and that’s not the half of it. It could get to be dangerous. This girl knows too much to run any risk of getting her angry.
“You’re kidding,” I said lamely.
“I’ve just told you I’m not kidding. And you must think I have a queer sense of humor. Maybe I should go into burlesque and undress myself before a bigger audience.”
“All right,” I said. “You’re not kidding. And I’ll admit you’re devastating,