Yellow Dog Contract by Ross Thomas

why.”
    â€œAre you and she still as close as ever?”
    Audrey nodded. “Maybe even more so. I think she saved my life after Jack died.” Jack Dunlap, Audrey’s late husband, had been one of those financial geniuses that Texas sometimes produces. By the time he was thirty he was already a millionaire. At thirty-five, which was when he had married Audrey, he was a millionaire many times over as well as part owner of a professional football team, a power in the Democratic party, a member of the boards of at least a dozen major corporations, and a nut about sports and hunting. In 1972 he had been hunting splittail grouse in North Dakota. He had climbed over a barbed-wire fence, his shotgun had gone off, and that had been the end of Jack Dunlap. I thought my nephew looked exactly like him. My niece was the image of her mother, which was just as well because Jack had been kind of ugly.
    â€œShe’s been with you how long?” I said.
    â€œSix years, ever since Nelson was born. I hired her as a social secretary because Jack insisted that I needed one. When I asked him what a social secretary did, he said he didn’t know but he had read about them in books. So I hired Sally. She was just out of Smith where she’d gone on a full scholarship and graduated with top honors, which isn’t bad for a kid from this town who was born near Ninth and U.”
    â€œNo,” I said, “not bad at all.”
    Audrey was silent for a moment, as though thinking. “Four weeks ago,” she said. “It must have started about four weeks ago.”
    â€œSally and Quane?”
    Audrey nodded. “It was a couple of weeks after I’d broken up with Arch—or he had broken off with me, which is actually how it happened. I was pretty upset and Sally came to the rescue again. She urged me to talk about it. And I did.”
    â€œHow’d you know about her and Quane?”
    â€œI didn’t know it was Quane, I just knew it was somebody. She’d leave at odd times. Matinees, I reckon. I asked her about it once or twice, but all she’d say was that he was white and married and that she knew she was a goddamned fool, but that she’d rather talk about my being a goddamned fool than about her being one. So we talked about Arch Mix and me.”
    I had been up since six and had eaten breakfast at six-thirty and I was hungry again. I got up and started opening cabinet doors. “Where’s the bread?” I said.
    â€œIn the bread box,” Audrey said.
    I found it and dropped two slices into the toaster. “You want some toast?”
    â€œNo.”
    I waited for the toast to pop up, found the butter and some strawberry jam in the refrigerator, put some on the toast, and sat back down at the table. “Did you and Arch ever talk about the union?” I said and took a bite of the toast.
    â€œSure. We talked about everything. I told you that.”
    â€œJust before you split up, was there anything about the union that was bothering him? I mean anything out of the ordinary?”
    Audrey looked at me strangely. “He talked about you a lot. It wasn’t about you exactly, but it was about you and the union back in sixty-four.”
    â€œWhat did he say?”
    She shook her head. “I listened, Harvey, but I didn’t keep notes. Maybe I should have because recently Sally’s been getting me to talk about the same thing.”
    â€œHow recently?” I said.
    She thought about it. “A month or so. Ever since Arch disappeared.”
    â€œWhat’d she get you to talk about?”
    â€œWell, I wanted to talk about what a rotten, no-good son of a bitch he is but Sally steered it around so that I found myself talking about what he’d told me. Sally’s no dummy and I thought she was trying to help me get him out of my system.” Audrey looked at me and smiled, but the smile was half sardonic, half rueful. “She was pumping me,