Free The Girl, the Gold Watch and Everything by John D. MacDonald

little telescope and shivered. He was studying the intricate monogram on the back of the watch when the bedroom door opened.
    "He always carried that," she said. "Always."
    "I guess I will. I'll have to wear a vest or get some kind of a belt clip arrangement."
    She was behind him, looking over his shoulder. Suddenly he was inundated by an almost strangling cloud of perfume.
    "Sometimes he'd look through that little telescope and then he'd chuckle."
    "I bet."
    "I asked him about it once. He wouldn't let me look through it. He said I didn't speak the language. I didn't understand. Will you let me look through it?"
    "I—uh—maybe when—uh—"
    She came around the chair. She made a wide circle around it and stood where he could see her for the first time, some eight feet away. He tried to swallow but could manage only half the process. "Bought it two years ago," she said in a grave whisper. "Tried it on once."
    She had brushed the brown hair until it gleamed, and for the first time he saw the reddish highlights in it. She was facing him squarely, but she had her face turned away from him. She stood like a recruit who had just been chewed out for bad posture. She was not trembling. Rather she seemed to be vibrating in some galvanic cycle too fast for the eye to perceive. He had the feeling that if he snapped his fingers all the circuits would overload and she'd disappear in a crackle of blue flame and a hot smell of insulation. He slowly began to strangle on the half-completed swallow. She wore a single garment. He could not guess at what possible utility it might have. There was an inch-wide ruffle of black lace around her throat. There were similar visible ruffles around her wrists. There was a third circling her hips, apparently floating in air several inches away from the pale and slender thighs. The three visible bands of black seemed joined together by some incredible substance as intangible as a fine layer of city soot, on a windshield. Miraculously affixed to this evanescence, and perfectly umbilically centered, was the pink, bloated, leering face, on some sturdier fabric, of the most degenerate looking rabbit he had ever seen.
    He completed the swallow with such an effort, it felt as if he were swallowing a handful of carpet tacks. For a tenth of a second he marveled at the uncanny insight of one Hoover Hess, and with a sobbing sound of guilt, inadequacy and despair, he roared out of the apartment and down the corridor toward the stairs. He heard a howl of frustration, and a long, hoarse, broken cry of, "Oh you baaaaaaastaaaarddd!" As he clumped down the stairs the corridor fire door swung slowly shut, and he heard those hoots of laughter again, heard them begin to soar upward, and then the door closed and he could hear no more.
    Two blocks from the apartment building he suddenly heard himself saying, "For God's sake, Wilma!" and realized he had been saying the same thing over and over for some time. The gold watch was still clutched in his hand. Two old ladies were staring at him with strange expressions. He slowed his headlong stride, put the watch in his pocket and gave them an ingratiating smile. One old lady smiled back. The other one tilted her chin at the sky, braced herself, and with a volume that made every car in that block give a startled swerve, screamed, "Stop thief!"
    It panicked him into a dead run, but as soon as he was around the next corner he slowed down, his legs trembling. He stood staring blindly into a bookstore window until his breathing was normal. He oriented himself and discovered he was seven or eight blocks from the Hotel Birdline. Suddenly, for the first time since telling it, he remembered the lie about Uncle Omar's personal records. He remembered how crafty he had felt when telling it. Sober, he knew it was a blundering stupidity.
    He went to the Birdline. The one without any space between his eyes was at the desk, the one with the volcanic acne. The clerk leaned into the small office