see, as clearly as if it had been written on the elevator wall, that this was something that involved Judy Bonner.
That sentence in her father’s cablegram—“Reports from Reno disquieting”—flashed into my mind, more disturbing than anything I’d heard from Polly Wagner. And it wasn’t five minutes later—when my bell hop had flung up the windows in my room, opened the door to Judy’s apartment, pocketed his tip and got rather hurriedly out—that I saw, on the chromium and glass table in the center of her charming rose-and-gray sitting room, the gossip sheet of one of the more sensational New York papers, with flamboyant red crayon marks all over it. I picked it up. It had a photograph of Judy Bonner in a white low-cut evening frock, seated at a roulette table with what seemed to me a very large stack of chips in front of her, laughing and having a grand time, while over her bare shoulder, in black tie and dinner jacket, leaned the man I’d seen meeting Kaye Gorman at the airport.
The photograph was captioned “Playboy Meets Girl?” Below it, heading the daily gossip column, was the following:
“Will the lovely Judith Bonner, now doing time in the divorce capital, take another chance at the wheel of matrimony with Playboy Dex Cromwell when she’s free?
“Rumor, which tells the truth—like a lot of well-known liars—when you least expect it, has it that Clem Bonner, who’s been given the air by the beautiful Judy, will patch it up with the first Mrs. Bonner again . . . now that she’s free . . . with one-third (dower right) of the four million dollar fortune of the tobacco king who dropped dead at the Kentucky Derby last year. Maybe that’s what they were talking about so earnestly at Armand’s opening the other night (Picture on Page 4.)”
I turned to Page 4. Smiling up at me, under the caption “Widow of Tobacco King Does the Hot Spots,” was the girl whose unsmiling sullen profile I’d been looking at ever since we’d left Omaha that morning. It said below: “Kaye Gorman, former show girl, widow of Lem Gorman, well-known sportsman who dropped dead at the Kentucky Derby, on her first appearance since the tobacco magnate’s death. Her first husband was Clem Bonner, whose second wife, Judith Bonner, is in Reno getting a divorce.”
I am not normally a drinking woman, but I poured myself a stiff shot of scotch from a half-empty bottle on the lacquer-and-chromium bar built neatly in between the long windows and drank it practically straight. Then I stepped out on the narrow balcony into the sun, and stood leaning weakly against the terra cotta balustrade, looking down into the Truckee River, thinking—for the first time in the twenty years I’d known Judy’s mother—that she had a good and sufficient reason to be in a real state of collapse . . . whether she knew it or not.
Then quite suddenly it dawned on me, standing there, why Judy hadn’t met me at the plane, why she’d had her friends meet me, why she’d been out riding when I got to the hotel. She’d left the paper, open and red-marked, where I’d have to see it, see it before I saw her . . . not knowing whether I knew all the gossip and rumor that was flying about or not. I felt a sharp sting of pity. What would she do—brazen it out? Or wasn’t there anything, really, to brazen out? Was it just that Clem Bonner was going back to the blonde girl he’d married his last year in Harvard, and she was letting him go? Or was it all something quite else? Was Polly Wagner right in thinking she was still desperately in love with Clem? And if so, did that explain Dex Cromwell . . . ?
But chiefly—and I think, looking back on it, it’s what actually was worrying me more than anything else—what was Kaye Gorman, Clem’s first wife, doing in Reno? She’d divorced Clem there, but that had been almost four years before. And it couldn’t have been the climate that brought her back. It was hardly fit for anything but a salamander.
I balanced my empty glass on the balcony rail and stared down on the flag-decked streets, sharp and objective there in the brilliant scorching sun. The air was as crystal-clear as the shallow swift-running water of the narrow river, and as heady as fine champagne. Ander the red and yellow and white and blue pennants strung over the streets, the people, dressed in Western clothes as unrestrained as the decorations, moved gaily, dodging in and out among cars parked at angles against the curbs. An old man on a pinto pony leading a procession of small children on ponies of varying sizes paraded solemnly down the middle of the street toward the Park. And somewhere in all this carnival town—The Biggest Little City in the World, the street sign said—was Judy Bonner.
“Did you look in the bar?” the bell hop had asked. I glanced back at the array of half-empty bottles on the cocktail bar between the windows, and thought of that picture of Judy with the stack of chips at the roulette wheel, the man bending down over her, almost touching her bare shoulder.
In the street below me a sudden appalling din rose over the crashing roar of the steam shovel in the River. A crowd collected around a big gray truck with bars like a jail, with horns honking and cowbells clattering uproariously. I saw a woman in white being hustled up the steps and inside the truck with several other women.
“That’s the Kangaroo Court,” a voice near me said. “They put you in it and fine you a box at the rodeo, if you haven’t got something Western on.”
I looked around. A man in well-cut riding breeches and a white shirt open at the neck was standing in the next little balcony, about ten feet from me.
“Oh,” I said.
“You’ve just come, haven’t you?”
I nodded.
“For the cure?”
I looked blank.
“That’s what they call getting a divorce,” he said, and I said “Oh” again.
He laughed. He had several gold teeth that showed when he opened his mouth, and there was something about him—about his sun-tanned baldish head and about his eyes, the whites slightly bloodshot and the lower lids a little puffy, and about the way he looked at me, that wasn’t awfully attractive.
“Did you come on the plane?” he asked.
I nodded.
“Well, let me give you a tip. Don’t trust anybody in this hole. They’re all out to get your money. That’s all they care about. Be careful of your lawyer’s wife, just for instance, if she invites you out to dinner and a little game. Don’t go—not if you don’t want to be taken for a couple of hundred before the evening’s over.”
He flicked his cigarette into the air and watched it hit the water.
“My name’s Ewing, Steve Ewing,” he said. “I’ll be glad to take you around till you know the ropes. I’m getting my divorce in a couple of weeks. I wouldn’t have come out here for it, but my wife and I haven’t lived together for eight years, so I just decided to get it over with quick. Let her marry him.”
He shrugged.
“I suppose you’re like all the rest—getting married again the minute you get your decree?”
I swallowed. “I’m not getting—”
“You’re wise, Mrs. Latham—very wise,” he said earnestly. I hadn’t had a chance to say I wasn’t getting a divorce, and I was so startled at his knowing my name that I didn’t try to correct him.
He laughed again.
“You see I know your name—I asked the elevator girl who you were.”
He leaned over his balcony and fixed his eyes earnestly on mine.
