“Could you bring some oysters on the half shell with a lot of cocktail sauce, some horseradish and lemon?” I asked. “Then bring us some of those cold, peppered shrimp, some onion soup, a steak about three inches thick, done medium rare, some French-fried onions, shoestring potatoes, cut some French bread, put on lots of butter, sprinkle on just a trace of garlic, put it in the oven, let it get good and hot so the butter melts all through the bread, put some sparkling Burgundy on the ice, and after that bring us a dish of ice cream, a huge pot of coffee, and the check.”
The waiter never batted an eyelash. “I could do that very nicely, sir.”
“How about you?” I asked Roberta.
“I could go for that in a big way.”
I nodded to the waiter, waited until the green curtains had dropped back into place, and said suddenly to Roberta, “Where were you at two-thirty a.m. Thursday?”
She said, “If I told you what happened that night, you wouldn’t believe it.”
“Bad as that?”
“Yes.”
“Tell me then.”
She said, “I’d kept away from Nostrander. He didn’t know I was in New Orleans; then he found me. You were there when he found me. You heard what he said. It was the first time I’d seen him for two years. I didn’t want to have a scene in front of you. The last time I had seen him, he had been absolutely crazy about me. In fact, he had a jealousy complex. That was one of the things which made him so distasteful to me. Whenever I’d try to go out with anyone else, he’d go absolutely crazy-I mean that literally. He was a very brilliant man, but completely unstable. Heaven help the woman whoever married him! He wouldn’t have let even the milkman come to the house.”