CHAPTER 29

disappeared, so I discreetly sat in the living room and read a chapter of 'Simon Called

Peter'—either it was terrible stuff or the whiskey distorted things because it didn't make any sense to me.

Just as Max and Sophie—after the first drink, Mrs. Foster and I called each other by our first names—reappeared, company began to arrive at the apartment door.

The sister, Catherine, was a slender, worldly girl of about thirty with a solid, sticky bob of red hair and a complexion powdered milky white. Her eyebrows had been plucked and

then redrawn at a more rakish angle, but nature's attempts to restore the original alignment gave her face a blurred appearance. As she moved about, there was a

constant clicking of innumerable pottery bracelets jingling on her arms. She entered with such a proprietary haste and looked around so possessively at the furniture that I

wondered if she lived there. But when I asked, she laughed immoderately, repeated my question aloud, and said she lived with a girlfriend at a hotel.

Mr. McKee was a pale, feminine man from the flat below. He had just shaved, as

indicated by a white spot of lather on his cheekbone, and he was most respectful in greeting everyone in the room. He told me he was in the "artistic game," and I later

learned he was a photographer and had made the dim enlargement of Mrs. Foster's mother that hovered like an ectoplasm on the wall. His wife was shrill, languid,

handsome, and horrible. She proudly informed me that her husband had photographed her a hundred and twenty-seven times since they had been married.

Mrs. Foster had changed into an elaborate afternoon dress of cream-colored chiffon,