“Regardless of anything else, Ralph, how the ’ell did you happen to cheat so clumsily? The cheating I can understand; the way it was done I can’t.”
Kennedy took a big drink, gave us one and, as he poured them, said sardonically:
“You give me credit for knowing better, then? You ought to.”
“If you did it deliberately, why?” I broke in. “If you wanted to do what Penoch asked, and lay off the girl—”
“We both happened to be in love,” he said calmly, as if laughing up his sleeve. His eyes, however, were averted.
“Huh?” snorted Penoch scathingly. “You in love?”
“For the first and only time in my life,” Kennedy admitted casually, his back toward us. “In fact, I’m so nuts about her that I couldn’t let her in for what she’d be in for with me. Don’t flatter yourself, Peewee. It wasn’t for you I did it. It was for her.”
“But why that way?” I barked.
“If I just broke off,” he said, eying a new glass of tequila with narrowed eyes, “she’d have taken a long while to get over it. Might as well cut everything off clean, show her what I am all at once, and blackjack her into hating me. Make it easier all around.”
For a moment his eyes met mine, and the mask was off. I don’t get sentimental as a rule, but I was looking at a man whose whole life had come up to torture him, and who was going through an accumulation of suffering.