And she kissed me. There was urgency in it, and something that might have been passion, and I felt her arms slip around me.

“I need you, Nate.” She pressed my right hand to her small firm left breast. “Please help me.”

This time she put her tongue in my mouth, and she was a lovely woman, but she was drunk, and she was nuts. Plus, she was my client’s wife.

On the other hand, the asshole was catting around on her, so it would serve the bastard right….

“No,” I said, pushing her gently away. “Jo, we’re not going to step over that line.”

“You don’t understand,” she said, pressing against me, slender fingers finding their way into my hair, a giddiness working itself into her voice. “My husband wouldn’t mind-we’ve always had an open marriage, Jim and I. We’ve both always been fiercely independent! Free spirits….”

As free spirits went, Jo was in one hell of a cage, and her pipe-sucking Brooks Brothers husband was an unlikely candidate for tree nymph.

Besides, in shadowing both of them, I’d seen Forrestal score with half a dozen dames in under two weeks, and Jo’s assignations were strictly with booze bottles.

So I pulled away, rose, poured her another drink, and stuck to my story: nobody was after her or her boys. An hour-and three drinks and six cigarettes-later she seemed to be listening to reason.

She was shaking her head, staring into her sickness. “But these dreams-what you say are delusions … they’re so vivid, Nate. The feelings seem so real.”

“The feelings in you are real,” I said, and took both her hands in mine and looked right at her, made sure she was looking back at me. “Listen-let me tell you something about myself that I don’t tell just anybody.”

She smiled sexily; and she was sexy, bonkers or not, drunk or sober. “You’d share something personal with me, Nate? Something private?”

“Yes,” I said, and I told her about my father killing himself with my gun.