The Revengers (47 page)

I said deliberately, “Martha is marrying Michael Brent, our red-haired young man in Miami. But I have a hunch he’s not going to be doing that for us very much longer.”

I heard Eleanor’s breath catch. Her face looked suddenly pale and shocked. “I ... I don’t understand. I thought. . . ."

“I know what you thought,” I said. “And it was true up to a point. She did come out from New Mexico to see me with some idea of. . . . . Well, we go back a number of years and she was pretty lonely.”

Martha licked her lips. “She loved you! And you loved her. I could see that so plainly when you opened the door of the suite that day in Miami, and suddenly saw her standing there in the hall. That’s why I left like that. I’d done something pretty nasty to her once in the line of business, as you know. I owed her something, like getting myself the hell out of the way so there’d be nothing to interfere. . . .”

“Giving her a clear field,” I said. “Noble. Nothing a man loves like being passed from woman to woman like a box of chocolate candy.”

“It wasn’t like that!” Eleanor protested. “It was on your face when you saw her. She meant a lot to you, too. And I was just a job and somebody for whom you . . . had a certain sympathy. Because of what had happened to me. I was damned if I was going to hang around and trade on that, Matt. I just complicated things for the two of you by being there. So I got the hell out of the way. Twice.” Suddenly she was angry in a strange, perverse way. “What’s the matter with the dumb girl, anyway? Is she really going to marry that . . . that freckled little boy?”

I said, “It’s the best thing that could happen to her. Marry that freckled little boy and raise a brood of freckled little kids and forget all about violent guys like Bob Devine and me. And Brent’s not so damned little, really. He’s a good man, a very good man for her, and I’m very happy for her.”

“I’ll just bet you are! Don’t forget, I saw your face when she popped up unexpectedly like that. You looked like a man just getting a good view of the Promised Land.”

I looked at her for a moment, sitting there tense and angry like a small, fierce predator. And the strange thing, the marvelous thing, was that she was angry not because some other woman had got her claws into me, but because that other woman had been too stupid to appreciate me, and had rejected me. I felt very humble. It was more than I had any right to expect.

I swallowed the thing in my throat and said gently, “Elly, guys like me are always dreaming of a vine-covered cottage to come back to and a nice girl like Martha to put into it. It’s a pretty dream, but in real life it’s damned hard on the nice girl like Martha. And she had enough sense of self-preservation to see it at last, and grab a good steady guy who could give her the kind of life she really wanted, and I’m very glad she did.” I cleared my throat. “So much for Martha. Nice girl, Martha. Nice guy, Mike Brent. Now can we talk about something else? Or somebody else?”

Her eyes were steady on my face. “Like whom?”

“Give me a drink,” I said, “and I’ll probably think of somebody.”

I did.