But still she preened, and fluffed her halo of determinedly auburn hair, and threw Ross the coy, flirtatious, low-lashed glances of a woman two decades younger. "You know, darling, you'll be glad, too."
"Oh?" Ross stood unbending. "Just what is it I'll be glad of?"
"Why, that you helped me, of course." Astrell laughed, just a bit too shrilly. "It's not as if I were asking you to give it to me, you know. I'm more than willing to pay for it, and I've the money, too—more money than you can even dream of, all my savings from those years when no one from here to the Belt even thought of giving a social affair top rating, if Astrell didn't attend."
The woman seemed to grow taller as she spoke. Head high, she moved to and fro with slow, graceful steps—a queen in bearing, however caricatured, living for the moment in her dreams of glory-radiant days gone by.
Then, once more, she paused close to Ross. "Besides, my dear, once I've the catalyst, I'll be young again—and very, very grateful to you." An insinuating laugh. "Darling, have you any idea how delightful it can be to hold the gratitude of a girl whose talents were such that she was able to marry the seven richest men in all the outer planets, one after the other?"
Again, the woman reached out a pudgy hand to caress Ross. His teeth clicked together, as if with a sudden involuntary shiver. Catching the hand in his own, not too gently, he pushed it away.
"There's something you need to understand, Astrell," he said in a tight, controlled voice. "I can't think of anything I'd rather do than milk you of all that money you've piled up. But I haven't got the catalyst, or the formula either. So you're wasting your time, mooning around me."
"Don't worry, Thigpen. I understand." Astrell gave vent to a knowing, conspiratorial giggle. "You've got to be careful. Killing Tornelescu—that was dangerous; you can't afford to admit it, even to me. The same way with the catalyst: you've no intention of confessing you've so much as heard of it. But if a case of it were to turn up in my rooms, somehow, and a money-case were to vanish—"
Ross said, "Get out."