Pretty Leslie by R. V. Cassill Read Free Book Online Page B

of rags, lots of solvent. For now the antiques were something to be busy at while she waited for Ben.
    Once or twice a week it was her pleasure to have set up the patio behind their house for a party of two. Snacks and liquor were out on a fresh tablecloth. A smart, iron-framed easy chair was drawn up conversationally in front of the chaise on which Leslie, freshly made up for him, reclined.
    On such evenings as he came from the garage, she had a book or a writing pad or a crossword puzzle in her hands. He thought he had never caught her with her head actually reclining on the pillow behind it. But he did not quite believe in her absorption in her props of the busy life. Behind her papers she was chewing up and digesting the world she had swallowed with quick bites during the day—chewing it up for him.
    And there was something in her not yet relaxed supine figure to suggest attention, as though listening still, if no longer watching: a constant guard scanning the three distinct layers of suburb that separated them from the slum belt around the commercial city.
    â€œYou know what LaVerne was telling me this morning?”
    LaVerne Grace, as he was supposed to remember, was the divorced girl at Bieman’s Studio. She did “mechanicals”—whatever those might be. “LaVerne was talking about a cousin of hers, female, and she mentioned that the poor girl had lost one eye when she was little. And she said, ‘She’s made a handicap of it.’ I said, ‘Goodness, it is a handicap.’ But she insisted. Lots of people have glass eyes.”
    Ben’s smile bobbed appreciatively and Leslie wallowed in his tolerant observation as in a warm bath.
    â€œI told Dolores about it on the way home. She didn’t quite get the point either. But she laughed because she knew it had amused me. Dolores would rather kill a human being than a healthy laugh.”
    Leslie said, “She laughed and shook her bowlful of jelly, and then gave me a long—I think serious, you can’t always tell with her—talk about the way a girl could learn to always offer herself in profile so men couldn’t see how her glass eye failed to track. Dolores always has some pointers for the game.”
    Ben wet his mouth with a highball. “I ask myself what I would do if Dolores Calfert offered herself to me in profile.”
    â€œBen, you could tickle her.”
    â€œYou’d be jealous.” He shook his head in a firm, well-henpecked negative.
    â€œI’d be proud,” Leslie insisted. Ben saw that he had been, like the rest of Leslie’s familiars, fictionalized. My husband, the Don Juan of Rixton Dell. Maintains his practice for a front. Doles pills to infants, but my dear, O my dear, it’s the mothers who constitute his practice . What did she say about him—or just day dream about him—to inflate him enough for her restless interest? “And Dolores would be so pleased. No one at the shop ever takes the bait unless it’s idiot boy Don Patch. And she tries so hard. It’s not every switchboard operator who comes on with Chanel Five.”
    â€œIs she the one who inscribed Patch’s name above the john?”
    â€œThat would be Dolly Sellers, who’s confusedly jealous because Don seduced her buddy Pat.”
    â€œYou know this of your own knowledge?” Ben asked with judicious, deadpan amusement. “Is there really a bulletin board there where someone posts the score? I mean posts it the morning after, so you gossips won’t waste your coffee break?”
    â€œWe do our work,” Leslie said, with stylized reproach. “People confide in me.”
    â€œThey certainly do.”
    â€œNaturally Pat gave no inkling.”
    â€œA telltale sign in itself!”
    â€œWhat? But Dolly rather more than hinted she knew. I put two and two together.”
    â€œThat’s a vocation like any other,” he said. He thought that the sum of all