“No, Wallace.” Keats stuck his jaw out. “I’m not letting it get this far without knowing the whole story. You say you’ve been cuckolding Priam for almost a year now. Is Delia Priam in love with you?”
“I don’t think so,” said Wallace. “I think it’s the same thing with Delia that it is with me. A matter of convenience.”
“But it stopped some time ago, didn’t it?” Keats had a wink in his voice; man-to-man stuff. “It’s not still going on.”
“Certainly it’s still going on. Why should it have stopped?”
Keats’s shoulders bunched. “You must feel plenty proud of yourself, Wallace. Eating a man’s food, guzzling his liquor, taking his dough, and sleeping with his wife while he’s helpless in a wheelchair on the floor below. A cripple who couldn’t give you what you rate even if he knew what was going on.”
“Oh, didn’t I make that clear, Lieutenant?” said Alfred Wallace, smiling. “Priam does know what’s going on. In fact, looking back, I can see that he engineered the whole thing.”
“What are you giving me!”
“You gentlemen apparently don’t begin to understand the kind of man Priam is. And I think you ought to know the facts of life about Priam, since it’s his life you’re knocking yourselves out to save.”
Wallace ran his thumb tenderly around the brim of his hat. “I don’t deny that I didn’t figure Priam right myself in the beginning, when Delia and I first got together. I sneaked it, naturally. But Delia laughed and told me not to be a fool, that Priam knew, that he wanted it that way. Although he’d never admit it or let on ― to me, or to her.
“Well,” said Wallace modestly. “Of course I thought she was kidding me. But then I began to notice things. Looks in his eye. The way he kept pushing us together. That sort of thing. So I did a little investigating on the quiet.