'Yes,' she said, and at last she looked at him. Her face was drunk and horrified. 'What's going to become of him, Billy? What can become of him?'
Billy shook his head. He hadn't the slightest idea. Furthermore, he found he had no more urge to contemplate the question than he'd had to contemplate that famous news photograph of the South Vietnamese general shooting the supposed Vietcong collaborator in the head. In a weird way he couldn't quite understand, this was like that.
'He chartered a private plane to fly to Minnesota, did I tell you that? Because he can't bear to have people look at him. Did I tell you that, Billy?'
Billy shook his head again.
'What's going to become of him?'
'I don't know,' Halleck said, thinking: And just by the way, what's going to become of me, Leda?
'At the end, before he finally gave up and went, both of his hands were claws. His eyes were two . . . two bright little sparks of blue inside these pitted, scaly hollows. His nose . . .' She stood up and wobbled toward him, hitting the corner of the coffee table hard enough with her leg to make it shift - She doesn't feel it now, Halleck thought, but she's going to have one hell of a painful bruise on her calf tomorrow, and if she's lucky she'll wonder where she got it, or how.
She grasped at his hand. Her eyes were great glittering pools of uncomprehending horror. She spoke with a gruesome, breathy confidentiality that prickled the skin of Billy's neck. Her breath was rank with undigested gin.
'He looks like an alligator now,' she said in what was almost an intimate whisper. 'Yes, that's what he looks like, Billy. Like something that just crawled out of a swamp and put on human clothes. It's like he's turning into an alligator, and I was glad he went. Glad. I think if he hadn't gone, I would have gone. Yes. Just packed a bag and ... and . . .'
She was leaning closer and closer, and Billy stood up suddenly, unable to stand any more of this. Leda Rossington rocked back on her heels and Halleck just barely managed 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 ...