The Drowner by John D. MacDonald Page B

she was over a week late and nervous about it and she wanted a rabbit test. It was negative, and she came around the next day or so. And if it hadn’t been negative, she wouldn’t have wanted anything done because that wasn’t her style. Gave her a complete check. So damned healthy she had enough vitality for three women. Sam hadn’t changed, so that part of her life hadn’t gone wrong. From her pay and the support from Kelse Hanson and some little investment, she had enough over so she was sending her mother a little every month. Rule out money. That marriage was dead and going to stay dead, because not only had she found out the difference between a man and a boy, Hanson wasn’t trying any kind of selling job on her. Too busy trying to crawl back into the college-boy role, like the first step in working his way back to the womb. Had my own guess about it. When the year was up she’d put in for the divorce and head north, and Sam would find out then what she was worth to him and go marry her and bring her back, but a man like Sam isn’t going to marry until he finds out, like a shot in the head, he can’t do without it.”
    “Doctor, you keep side-stepping.”
    “Give me a chance. Now how about momentary mental instability? Nothing neurotic about Lucille. Solid as a rock. These past few weeks? Hah? So I’ll say she had something on her mind. But I don’t know what it was.”
    “But you could make a guess?”
    Rufus Nile hopped down off the treatment table, yanked a drawer open, took out an opened bottle of Jack Daniels, held it up and said, “Hah?”
    “With plain water, thanks.”
    “End of the day.” He fixed the drinks in large paper cups. “Got a weakness for guessing. Take the situation with Sam. He doesn’t go around telling anybody anything without a reason. He made it awful damn fast. Honesty is relative. So here you have this intense physical affair going on. And she has standards set pretty high, in spite of the affair. For a woman like that it has to be something significant. Some kind of love. She never knew anybody like Sam Kimber before. Now just suppose she found out, as Sam got more chummy with her, that in a business way he was playing it so close to the line, you could flip a coin to find out whether to call him crooked or not? It’s just the sort of thing that would worry a woman like that in just the way she seemed worried. She’d know you can’t change a man like Sam. So it would trouble her. She’d wonder if that made the relationship a little more unsanitary. Understand, I’m only guessing. But there are people around who could have told her a few stories about Sam. And they wouldn’t sound pretty. But it isn’t anything she’d kill herself over. She might decide to start untangling herself, or she might decide the hell with it, but there wouldn’t be room for any third decision. I know if you can save your company that twenty-five thousand, you’ll be a big man and get a bonus maybe, but it wouldn’t be fair and it wouldn’t be reasonable.”
    “But she was a very good swimmer.”
    “And it was about ninety-three in the shade and that lake always runs a little colder than the others. It can happen to the best. Abdominal cramps maybe, jackknifed her right up. Don’t suicides leave notes?”
    “Not when they know what it will do to the insurance, Doctor.”
    Nile shook his head quickly. “Stanial, you’ll make a good try at it, but you won’t make it stick.”
    Watching Nile obliquely and carefully, Stanial said in a joking tone, “Maybe I’d be better off if there was a murder clause, too.”
    “It would make more sense than suicide?”
    “Would it?”
    “Now hold on!” Nile said angrily. “I said no word about murder. I was just trying to say suicide is the most unlikely thing I can think of.”
    Stanial leaned against the window sill sipping his drink. As a professional he had learned long ago to divide the people he interrogated into his own categories,