Jade in Aries by Donald E. Westlake Page A

was strange, but that was the effect the party had on me. Not that they were fantasies, though some of them were in out-and-out drag, feminine pants suits and coiffed hair and false eyelashes and make-up and earrings, but that I was the fantasy, intruding on their reality. Because they were the majority, I suppose, and I was alone.
    Ross shouted in my ear, “Drinks through that doorway! Want to talk to Henry?”
    Henry Koberberg, he meant, his partner and the sixth suspect on the list. I nodded, he nodded back with a big smile, and he was off and I was alone.
    But not for long. Stewart Remington emerged from the surge of guests like a luxury liner out of a fog bank. He extended his hand to be shaken—I noticed again the lack of strength in it—and leaned close to bellow, in an even deeper baritone than usual, “Jerry told me he invited you!”
    I shouted back, “I hope it’s all right with you.”
    “It’s fine with me!” he yelled. “Manzoni’s going into court on Monday! Anything you do is fine with me!”
    I nodded, rather than shout again.
    He waved an arm—I noticed that tonight he was wearing a cape, waist-length, blue, white satin lining—and roared, “Drinks through that door over there!”
    I nodded my thanks, he gave me a meaningless nod and wink and smile, and off he went into the fog bank again, patting shoulders and cheeks as he went.
    I saw no one I recognized. The room was long, but rather narrow, and there were probably twenty-five people present, all standing, all drinking, but less than half smoking. They were in five or six fluctuating conversational groups, and it was obvious that all these people knew one another, that I was the only one meeting the group for the first time.
    They all seemed so happy. Watching them, I thought at first it was a kind of hysterical happiness, urgent and artificial: Germany in the twenties. But it wasn’t that, or at least I soon stopped thinking so. What I finally decided was that the apparent artificiality and overstatement came from the fact that these people were more expressive and outwardly emotional than most men. To be in a room full of men dressed like South American birds and chattering like a beauty salon made for a certain sense of dislocation; it became difficult to say what was a normal level of behavior and what was strain.
    Leo Ross had not returned with Henry Koberberg. Stewart Remington was no longer in sight. I caught a quick glimpse of Cary Lane, blond hair gleaming as he pirouetted in the middle of a conversational group at the far end of the room, but then people moved in the intervening space and I lost him again. David Poumon and Bruce Maundy were supposed to be here as well, but I didn’t see either of them.
    There was steady traffic in both directions through the doorway that both Ross and Remington had pointed out to me, so after a minute or two I headed in that direction, skirting along the edge of the room and getting only a couple of questioning glances from people I passed. Most of the partygoers were deeply involved in their conversations or in one another or simply in their own reactions to things.
    I got to the doorway finally, started through, and bumped into Bruce Maundy, who was coming out, carrying two highball glasses with iced drinks. He was in a blue turtleneck sweater tonight, black trousers, and a wide glittering silvery belt that looked like an outsized wristwatch expansion band.
    His reaction was immediate; he glared at me, glared at the drinks in his hands as though they were the only things keeping him from throwing himself at my throat, glared at me again, and leaned close to my face to snarl at me through clenched teeth, saying, “I told you to stay away from me.”
    “I was invited here,” I said. I preferred not to have a scene in public, it would complicate the work I had to do.
    “You won’t follow me around any more,” he said, and brushed by me with more than the necessary roughness.
    I watched him,