"Nothing, Roger," Kim said innocently. "It's just that so many nice men like you place their wives in ivory towers, and stop considering them flesh and blood. Sometimes," she added with a rueful almost ironic smirk, "it can be a rude awakening."

How true. How Goddamned true, Roger glumly thought. Kim hit the nail on the head. And what the devil, why shouldn't he go up and have a drink with this delightful, young woman? Surely no harm would be done… certainly nothing like the harm his own black-haired bitch of a wife was doing to him. If she was, he had to keep reminding himself, if she was…

"All right, you convinced me, Kim," he said, and his heart suddenly felt free, for in the sixteen years of marriage he hadn't so much as looked at another woman much less been with one alone and socially.

It was just like Kim said, he had placed his wife in the realm of the Gods, and she wasn't. His entire concentration on Lonnie had been unrealistic, and now that there was the possibility that she didn't consider her husband as the be-all and end-all of creation, and was unfaithful to his dream-like image of her. His ivory tower of devotion was crumbling rapidly now that its inherently impractical, sand-like foundation had been cracked by Oliss' lewd and evil lies. And Kim Copeland, amoral whore that she was, had been tipped to this by Zeigler, and with callous disregard or sympathy, started the final razing of Roger Carmel's idyllic world, coldly and calculatingly using her feminine and lurid wiles with all the effectiveness of a master game player. Roger Carmel never really had a chance.

Her apartment was facing the rear garden on the third floor, and was a spacious and attractive one-bedroom flat. Roger was a little surprised that a secretary could afford the obviously fine quality of Danish modern furniture and hand-rubbed walnut lamps and fine prints on the walls.