“I said forget it.”

“Yes. Good night, Joe.”

“Good night.”

Leland looked at the handset, as if it could tell him what had been on Roberts’ mind. The ending had come abruptly after so much meandering and apparently pointless searching for conversation. Leland had to wonder if he had not been exposed to a side of Roberts that he had seen and misinterpreted in others. It was supposed to be an interest in people. It was just curiosity, and when it was satisfied, these presumably gregarious types turned rude. Leland was not a patient—as Roberts had reminded him—and therefore might not require first-class consideration. It was only a thought. The other possibility was that Roberts had had a private interest in learning whether Leland had connections with the press. Leland supposed that he had those connections: the newspapers had participated in the favor the Port Smith Police Department had done him when he had left Port Smith. He felt his mind wandering. He went up the stairs.

The darkness settled him. He heard her in her bathroom and once in the hall. The light switch clicked and he looked out the window to the lawn below. Dark. His thoughts went from the case, which was impenetrable now, to what the Reynolds woman had said, and he tried to imagine the people who could associate him with killing. And then there was Dave Schoenstein, who had almost leaped at the chance to wreck what remained of what Leland had thought was friendship. Leland had to ask himself if the things that had happened to him had not insulated him from other people. He had hidden the things they might not understand; he would have done that if he had never had a public life. People thought they knew him when they did not. He had had more difficulty with it in the past, but tonight it seemed to hold him. It held him like a cage. And he had reached a depth of tiredness and strain in which he could not trust what he felt.

Norma knocked on the door. He told her to come in.

“Don’t turn on the light,” she said.

“How do you feel?” He sat up and took his cigarettes from the night table.

“I don’t know. I thought that if I talked to you I would feel better.… I could talk to Wendell, but I’d have to tell him the whole business before I could get to my own reaction. I’m too tired for that. Sort of. I’m not interested in telling everything to him.” She sat on the bed. “That stupid woman. If she had stopped to look at the way you were taking what she was saying, she would have seen that it couldn’t possibly be true. You didn’t go after her. You didn’t go after Wendell on the telephone. I was in your office Monday when you chewed out that reporter who bothered you, so it isn’t that you’re afraid of people.”