to catch her by the shoulders ... he had also drunk too much, it seemed. If he had missed her, she might very well have brained herself on the same glass-topped, brass-bound coffee table (Trifles, $587 plus mailing) on which she had struck her leg ... only instead of waking up with a bruise, she could have waked up dead. Looking into her half-mad eyes, Billy wondered if she might not welcome death.
'Leda, I have to go.'
'Of course,' she said. 'Just came for the straight dope, didn't you, Billy dear?'
'I'm sorry,' he said. 'I'm sorry about everything that's happened. Please believe me.' And, insanely, he heard himself adding: 'When you talk to Cary, give him my best.'
'He's hard to talk to now,' she said remotely. 'It's happening inside his mouth, you see. It's thickening his gums, plating his tongue. I can talk to him, but everything he says to me - all of his replies - come out in grunts.'
He was backing into the hall, backing away from her, wanting to be free of her soft, relentlessly cultured tones, needing to be free of her gruesome, glittering eyes.
'He really is,' she said. 'Turning into an alligator, I mean. I expect that before long they may have to put him in a tank ... they may have to keep his skin wet.' Tears leaked from her raw eyes, and Billy saw she was dribbling gin from her canted martini glass onto her shoes.
'Good night, Leda,' he whispered.
'Why, Billy? Why did you have to hit the old woman? Why did you have to bring this on Cary and me? Why?'
'Leda -'
'Come back in a couple of weeks,' she said, still advancing as Billy groped madly behind him for the knob of the front door, holding on to his polite smile by a huge act of will. 'Come back and let me have a look at you when you've lost another forty or fifty pounds. I'll laugh ... and laugh ... and laugh.'
He found the knob. He turned it. The cool air struck his flushed and overheated skin like a benison.
'Good night, Leda. I'm sorry . . .'
'Save your sorry!' she screamed, and threw her martini glass at him. It struck the doorjamb to Billy's right and shattered. 'Why did you have to hit her, you bastard? Why did you have to bring it on all of us? Why? Why? Why?'
Halleck made it to the corner of Park Lane and Lantern Drive and then collapsed onto the bench inside the bus shelter, shivering as if with ague, his throat and stomach sour with acid indigestion, his head buzzing with gin.
He thought: I hit her and killed her and now I'm losing weight and I can't stop. Cary Rossington conducted the hearing, he let me off without so much as a tap on the wrist, and Cary's in the Mayo Clinic. He's in the Mayo Clinic, and if you believe his wife, he looks like a fugitive from Maurice Sendak's Alligators All Around. Who else was in on it? Who else was involved in a way that the old Gypsy Might have decided called for revenge?
He thought of the two cops, rousting the Gypsies when they came into town ... when they had presumed to start doing their Gypsy tricks on the town common. One of them had just been a spear-carrier, of course. Just a patrol-car jockey following ...
Following orders.
Whose orders? Why, the police chiefs orders, of course. Duncan Hopley's orders.
The Gypsies had been rousted because they had no permit to perform on the common. But of course they would have understood that the message was somewhat broader than that. If you wanted Gypsy folk out, there were plenty of ordinances. Vagrancy. Public nuisance.
Spitting on the sidewalk. You name it.
The Gypsies had made a deal with a fanner out on the west side of town, a sour old man named Arncaster. There was always a farm, always a sour old farmer, and the Gypsies always found him. Their noses have been trained to smell out guys like Arncaster, Billy thought now as he sat on the bench listening to the first droplets of spring rain strike the bus shelter's roof. Simple evolution. All it takes is two thousand years of being moved along. You talk to a few people; maybe Madame Azonka does a free reading or two. You sniff for the name of the fellow in town who owns land but owes money, the fellow who has no great love for the