Pale Gray for Guilt by John D. MacDonald Page A

He fled out of the cool into the midafternoon sunlight.
    She gazed somberly toward the door. "Seems to have turned chicken. Have you noticed the progressive emasculation of the American male, Travis? Present company excluded, of course."
    She finished the soft drink with a rattling slurp amid the cracked ice, cheeks sucked hollow, and stood up in her sky-blue linen boat shorts, and her basque shirt, shook her hair back and smiled benignly up at me. "I counted myself in," she said in a low voice.
    "How's that?"
    "Since we left the river, I've felt like a bulky package you were tired of carrying around, and you were looking for a coin locker. I never knew Tush. I never met Janine. But I have a very hard nose, dear, and I don't scare, and I want to share."
    "I'll give it some thought."
    "You do that."

Four
    I HAD to give a lot of thought right then and there to getting a good quick line on Connie. Janine's parents didn't know her. But somebody who had been close to the Bannons would know who she might be. I had to dig through the fragments of old memories and piece something together. I tried walking and thinking, Puss quietly, patiently trudging along beside me.
    I found a dark little cocktail lounge, and a dark table in a corner. They had one cocktail waitress, and the small percentage of her that was not bare was cruelly bound and laced into the compulsory bunnyfication of tiny waist, improbable uplift and separation of breast, revelation of cleavages front and rear. She had a tired, pretty, sour little face, a listless manner. When she left with the order, Puss clamped her hand on my arm and stared after her, saying, "Santa Claus is coming to town."
    They had their Christmas decoration up. It was a lush plastic spray of mistletoe, affixed exactly where the nubile legions of the Heffner Empire affix their fluffy white bunny tails. It expressed such a perfect comment on commercialized Christmas, it gave Puss a case of gasping chuckles that turned into hiccups, which were soon quelled by her big swallows from the steinkrug of dark beer on draft.
    I shoved my memory back to the drinks at Tush and Janine's breakfast bar two months earlier, when we had played what happened to who. And I finally came up with Kip Schroeder, the quarterback who, after seven years of high school ball, New Jersey AllState, and five years of college ball, a couple of AllAmerican mentions, had been held together with wire, tape and rivets. He had been obsoleted by giant strides in nutrition. He was structured like a fireplug, and every year the line he had to see over was higher and wider. But where the hell was he? He and his wife, whose name I couldn't remember, had been best man and matron of honor at the wedding of Tush and Jan. I had to have a football buff, one of those nuts who know every statistic and what happened to everybody.
    I tried the bald bartender, breaking up his murmured conversation with the mistletoe lass. His frown wrinkled the naked skull almost all the way up to the crown of his head.
    "I think maybe Bernie Cohn. He does the sports on WBRO-TV It ought to be a good time to catch him there at the station. Janie, look up the number of the gennaman, and plug the phone in over there, huh?"
    It was a little pink phone with a lighted dial. She had to use a lighter to find the baseboard phone connection. She started to tell me the number, then shrugged and dialed it herself and handed me the phone.
    I got the switchboard and then I got Bernie, who said, "Yes, yes, yes?" with irritable impatience until I told him my question. Then he sounded pleased. "Let me see now. Schroeder. Schroeder. I'm not drawing a blank buddy. You can put odds on that. I'm running through the career, up to the last thing I heard. Okay. Here it is. Two years ago Kip was athletic director, Oak Valley School, and that's in… just a minute… Nutley, New Jersey. Right?"
    "Sure appreciate it."
    "Did I win you a bet, fella? Express your appreciation by telling all