13 White Tulips by Frances Crane

Author:Frances Crane
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MysteriousPress.com/Open Road
Published: 2022-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

14

The fog in Union Square was snow-white and just thick enough to be mysterious. Up above, Nob Hill was wrapped in it the way things from a good shop are swathed in tissue paper. I wondered if Russian Hill also had it like that. The yellow fog lights were on in the streets. Cars were tooting like mad the way they do in a fog.

There were more people than I expected in El Prado, it being Saturday. Leonora Strehl had a table for us; the head waiter ushered me there and I sat down and drowned the morning and the fog and my worry about Pancho and my husband’s stern lecture on account of Vicente with a really first-rate martini. We had another, by which time I felt a lot happier. I took stock of my companion, very lovely again in black, very chic, but with signs of tears around her turquoise eyes. There were lots of good-looking, well-dressed women around us, but Leonora Strehl was something special. I wished I’d known I was coming here when I dressed this morning, but when I remembered where all I had been, my gray flannel suit seemed fine, and anyway Lee was talking about it.

“That odd golden-brown color in your accessories just sets it off,” she said. “Very chic. Whoever would have thought to combine that color with gray?”

“Somebody in Paris,” I said. “I bought the hat and gloves and bag there last year. But my shoes are strictly Americano. The color is something like that big bag you were carrying the first time I saw you, Lee.”

Her face clouded.

“I took it back. I couldn’t bear it after—what I had used it for. To carry my pistol and all. The store didn’t mind. Nothing had happened to it and I’d only used it that once.”

“I’ve done the same thing often enough,” I admitted.

“The Italians are said to make wonderful shoes,” Lee said, to change the subject to a pleasanter one.

“They look wonderful,” I said. “I had some made when there but for some reason they never feel right on my American feet.”

“I wish I could travel like that,” Lee said. “Charles never can get away. If he does go anywhere it’s to a medical meeting. He studied abroad before the war and he seems to think that’s enough for me, too. His idea of a really big time is to go to a meeting of the American Medical Association and see an operation performed on the stage. When not at the meeting he tells me the new medical jokes, which incline definitely to the macabre. You’d never think he was like that on short acquaintance, would you, Jean? I mean, he’s so smooth with outsiders.”

Shouldn’t I be discreet? Pat had said to watch my step from now on. Was it the second martini? “I saw him outside his office this morning. He—he struck me as being much too interested in my dog. I told you that on the telephone.”

“Definitely, it’s peculiar.”

“I’m glad you’re divorcing him, Lee.

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