“He told me that,” she said. “He told me he liked women who brought out the best in themselves. Once he pointed out a very dark Negro woman who was especially well groomed. It was something esthetic with him. He said he was drawn to women who understood themselves. It was what attracted him to me, he said—which was purely an accident. I don’t have any insight into my appearance, how I look when I’m walking and so forth, the way actresses do. But that’s what he meant. Fashions, types, hair colors—none of that mattered. What about Betty? I want to hear about her. I don’t want to say her name, but I want to hear.”

Leland had to continue with what Murray Kaminsky had told him. When he came to his impressions of Betty Kaminsky, he related them truthfully, carefully, skipping nothing. He told her of the red hair, the long legs, even the clear nail polish. She did not interrupt him when he went on to tell of how well Betty Kaminsky had maneuvered her present husband. Leland repeated what she had said, without offering his own opinion. When she had known Mclver, she had stated very positively, he had been a coward and had never played the horses. Leland concluded with her version of how Mclver had acquired the scar. There were the notations in the insurance file and Leland offered his explanation for the conflict. “Her distortion may be at the foundation of her marriage with Kaminsky—part of it, anyway. For his own sake, Kaminsky sees her as someone who suffered deeply. Perhaps it’s his way of living with her self-possession. She’s at the center of her world; she makes no secret of it. She broke down today when she heard, but the truth is that before I told her, she said, ‘Now what has he done?’ As much as she’s capable of hating a person, she hates—hated—him for what he did to her—which amounts to not staying as interested in her as she is.”

“So he went outside for what he needed,” Norma said. “It had to be something like that. I’ve thought about it since I saw his picture in the book last night. He could have told me the truth; he knew that. We weren’t married when it came up, and probably he thought that I wouldn’t take the chance with someone who had cheated. I even said to him once that I never cheated—slept with a married man.” She swallowed.