The Betrayers Read Online Free PDF Page B

or not. As for me, after years of getting acquainted with people for devious purposes, I find it difficult to do the social bit for its own sake.
    At last I said, “I’m sorry, but I didn’t catch your name.”
    “McLain,” she said. “Isobel McLain.”
    I glanced at her left hand. “Mrs. Isobel McLain?”
    She smiled briefly. “Yes. Mrs. Kenneth McLain, to be exact.”
    “My name’s Helm, Matthew Helm,” I said.
    “Yes,” she said.
    “Have you been in the Islands long, Mrs. McLain?”
    Well, you can requisition a few yards of that dialogue from stock and cut it to fit. She hadn’t been in the Islands long. In fact, she’d only arrived a couple of days ago. She smiled again and gestured toward her smart, sleeveless black cocktail dress.
    “Not long enough to go native, Mr. Helm, as you can see. I’m still breaking the rules by wearing real clothes. They’ll probably throw me out of the hotel if I don’t buy a muu-muu pretty soon, but these primitive costumes leave me cold.”
    I had a hunch that a lot of things and people left Mrs.McLain cold, but somehow she made it seem like a challenge. The implication was that, for a very few special things and people, she could be quite warm indeed, and that it was very much worth an effort to find out if you were one of the favored few.
    She was really a strikingly good-looking woman, particularly in that company. I mean, at least half the ladies present, Jill included, were sporting the bright native dresses. They apparently came in all conceivable variations of the basic Mother Hubbard theme: long and short, tight and loose, plain and flowered. And while the style isn’t unattractive, it doesn’t make a woman look particularly well-dressed, at least not to my conservative Mainland eyes. I am also unalterably opposed to bare legs and sandals under dress-up conditions. Pardon me for being stuffy, but if the rules require me to put on coat and tie, the women can damn well struggle into stockings and high heels. Besides, they look prettier that way.
    Against that background of shapelessly fluttering prints, Isobel McLain looked unique and priceless in her unobtrusively well-fitting black dress. She gave the impression of being fairly tall, but that was only an illusion, I discovered, looking down at her from my six-feet-four. Without her heels, she’d have been a full foot shorter. Her proportions were attractive, decidedly feminine without being vulgarly spectacular. Her hair was dark brown, done in a smooth, restrained bubble with the ends tucked in, one of the nicer styles evolved from those giant bird’s-nest hairdos of a few seasons back.
    Her features were regular, her teeth were good, her skin was good, her posture was good, and you could say the same of a thousand women you’d never turn to look at twice. The simple fact was that she was a knockout, at least in the adult division. A man whose taste ran exclusively to leggy, breathless juveniles might not have been as impressed as I was. I put her age between thirty and thirty-five, although she could have passed for less.
    I asked, “Is your husband here, Mrs. McLain?”
    She shook her head. “No. Kenneth and I are taking separate vacations this year. He finds it restful to watch dice bounce around a table. Or horses run around a track. Or roulette wheels just go around and around and around.” She shrugged. “Unfortunately, I don’t. And after a while one gets tired of pretending, don’t you know?”
    A faint uneasiness made me look at her more sharply; she’d said a little too much in answer to a simple question. I mean, the cool, reserved, bored lady she was supposed to be would hardly have let a perfect stranger so far into her private life so soon.
    Or maybe she would, away from home with a couple of Scotches inside her—I noticed she’d already set her glass back on the bar for another refill. Still, it was a jarring note, a reminder that in our world of deceit and intrigue nothing was