In Brookdale, Connecticut, on the night Pam Tate died, Jack Dillman was standing in the bathroom putting the finishing touches on his second shave of the day when his wife banged on the door. “You planning to stay in there all night?” she called. “We’re already half an hour late.”
Jack opened the door. “Just finished,” he said, and raised his eyebrows. Carmen was wearing a silky dress of bright scarlet, cut deep between her breasts. “Wow,” Jack said. “You going on the prowl tonight?”
“Always prepared,” Carmen said. She turned her head when he bent to kiss her. “Careful, you’ll muss my hair.”
“Gonna give Hal a big thrill, I suppose.”
“He’s always responsive, the poor silly ass. And he’s the host.”
“He’s silly enough, all right,” Jack said sourly. “He wouldn’t know what to do if you dropped it in his lap.”
Carmen turned businesslike eyes to the mirror, retouching her makeup. “Then I might have to teach him,” she said. “If you didn’t hate him so much, it wouldn’t be near as much fun.”
Actually, Jack reflected as they drove the half-mile to the party, he didn’t hate Hal Parker at all. The guy was stupid, and an awful bore, for all his money, but nothing you couldn’t put up with one evening a week. And he doubted that Carmen was serious about Hal anyway — just about anybody else would do as well. Not that it mattered too much anyhow, he reflected. He had learned to make a sort of peace with that years ago.
All the same, Jack thought, it wouldn’t hurt to give Hal Parker a little jolt this evening, just to remind him that the goodies didn’t necessarily come free, so he began considering what kind of a jolt might do it. Trouble was, with a guy like Hal, it took quite some kind of jolt to get through at all.