Free Death Likes It Hot by Gore Vidal Page B

let in to join the nice people who were, all in all, a fairly handsome crew, divided evenly between the well-groomed, well-fed, middle-aged and the golden young on their summer vacation. The middle generation, mine, were all off working to make enough money to get a summer place out here and, at forty, to join the Ladyrock Yacht Club.
    Liz found me at the bar where I was ordering a Manhattan and hoping she’d come along to sign for it.
    She was beautiful, in black and white with something or other shining in her hair: her eyes glittered and she was pleasantly high.
    “Oh, it’s wonderful you got away! I was afraid you wouldn’t be able to.” She signed for my drink like a good girl. “Come on, let’s dance.”
    “Not until I’ve had this.”
    “Well, come on out on the pier then. I want to talk to you.” We made our way slowly across the dance floor. Young and old bucks pawed Liz who apparently was the belle of this ball. Several old school friends of mine, bald and plump (guests like myself; not yet members) greeted me and I knew at least a dozen of the girls, which Liz didn’t like.
    “You’re such a flirt,” she said, once we were on the pier. The moon shone white upon our heads. The young lovers were farther out the pier. A number of alcoholics reeled cheerfully along the boardwalk which separated the pier from the club itself.
    “I’ve just been around a long time.”
    But she was more interested in the murder. And she knew it was murder. “It’s all over town!” she said excitedly. “Everybody says Brexton drowned her.”
    “I wonder how that rumor started?” I hedged.
    “Oh,
you
know and you won’t tell me.” She looked at me accusingly. “I promise I won’t breathe a word to anybody.”
    “On your honor as a Girl Guide?”
    “Oh, Peter, tell me! You were there. You saw it happen, didn’t you?”
    “I saw it happen all right.” I put my empty glass down on the railing and put one arm around her; she shook away.
    “You
have
to tell,” she said.
    “Don’t I appeal to you?”
    “Men don’t appeal to women, as you well know,” she said loftily. “We are only interested in homemaking and, on topof that, our sexual instinct does not fully develop until the late twenties. I’m too young to have any responses.”
    “But I’m too old. The male, as we all know, reaches his sexual peak at sixteen after which he declines steadily into a messy old age. I am long past my prime … an erotic shell, capable of only a minor.…”
    “Oh, Peter, tell me or I’ll scream!” Her curiosity brought an end to our Kinsian dialogue. It has recently become the aim of our set to act entirely in accordance with the master’s findings and what the majority do and feel we do and feel, more or less. I was all ready to launch into the chapter on premarital petting which leads to climax but not penetration; unfortunately my companion, deeply interested in murder like any healthy girl, had begun to scream.
    “For God’s sake, shut up!” I said nervously. Luckily only alcoholics were on the terrace … a trio of minor executives in minor banks applauded softly her first scream; the couples on the pier were all engaged in premarital petting (college-type) and chose not to hear her.
    “You’ll tell me?” she took a deep breath, ready for a louder scream.
    “There’s nothing to tell. Mrs. Brexton took four sleeping pills, went in swimming and drowned before we could get to her.”
    “
Why
did she take four sleeping pills?”
    “That is the question which hovers over all our heads like the sword of Themistocles.”
    “Damocles,” said that classical scholar. “Somebody give her the pills?”
    “Who knows.”
    “She took them herself?”
    “So I think, but the police have other ideas.”
    “Like Paul Brexton giving them to her secretly?”
    “Or someone else … though why the nonfatal four, I’ll never know. If he really wanted to do her in, I should think the usual dozen would have been