"Thomas M. Disch - The Businessman" - читать интересную книгу автора (Disch Thomas M)

to him by Jerry Petersen (who was not only the personnel director but a close friend as well)
that he should seek professional advice.

A polite way of saying he was crazy. But then he was crazy, it could not be denied.
Only a crazy man would murder his wife, and that was what Glandier had done.



CHAPTER

3



At the age of only forty-eight, Joy-Ann Anker was dying of cancer. She'd become
violently ill in the second week of a diet that had been, up to that point, a great success. At
the hospital they'd done an exploratory operation and discovered a large malignant tumor in
her lower colon. It had already spread through her body beyond the point where surgery could
hold out any hope. The hospital put her on a course of chemotherapy, which made her almost
constantly nauseated, and sent her home. Ironically, the cancer, the operation, and the
chemotherapy combined had had the effect of a completely successful diet. For only the
second time in her life she was down to her supposedly ideal weight of 114 pounds and could
fit into clothes she hadn't worn for fourteen years. Most of her old clothes, however, she'd
given to her daughter three years ago, at a time when she'd lost faith in diets. Joy-Ann had
cried, after Giselle had gone off with the boxes of clothes, at her vision of the life that lay
ahead of her, a life of boredom, booze, and loneliness. She cried now at the thought that
even that life wasn't to be allowed her. Sometimes she could even laugh about the whole
thing. God, obviously, was playing a practical joke.

Officially, she wasn't supposed to know she was dying. The doctor and the priest had
both told her that though the odds were against her there was still hope. They didn't say
hope for how long, not to her. But during one of Bob's visits to the hospital, she'd pretended
to be asleep, so as not to have to talk to him (if there was anything worse than visiting
someone in a hospital, it was being visited), and Dr. Wandke had painted a very different
picture for her son-in-law. Six months. At most. That had been toward the end of January,
which gave her to the end of July if she was lucky.

There was some comfort in being able to pretend she didn't know. When Father
Rommel visited she could just be her usual self and wasn't under pressure to go to confession.
Whereas if her prognosis were out in the open, she'd have had to go through the motions of
making a confession, and it would have been a bad confession, since she was still, in her
heart of hearts, holding onto one sin she couldn't or wouldn't repent of. From a strictly
Catholic point of view it might not be a sin at all - just the opposite, in fact - but it wasn't
something she wanted to discuss with a priest. It had been bad enough all those years she'd
had to confess once a year to using birth control, but this. . . . In any case, she'd stopped
believing in a lot of things since the children had left home and she didn't have to be
responsible for _their_ religious beliefs.

It occurred to Joy-Ann that she might be able to get back the clothes she'd given
Giselle. Even better, she might ask for Giselle's own clothes, if Bob hadn't given them away to