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He sipped the wine, nodded his approval, waited for the waiter to pour into first Susan’s glass and then his own, then popped one of the crackers into his mouth and immediately took a sip of wine.

“What are you doing?” she asked in clear disapproval.

She had to wait until he had finished chewing for his reply.

“Don’t tell me you never saw anyone do that before?”

“I never saw anyone do that before,” she said. “It’s gross!”

“But it tastes so good,” he said. “Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it.”

“No, thank you.”

“Oh, go on, take a chance. Live dangerously. Escape your mundane social worker’s life.”

She looked very dubious and did not reply. Matt popped another Roquefort-on-cracker into his mouth, added some of the wine, chewed, and smiled with pleasure.

Curiosity got the better of her. She shrugged and reached for one of the crackers and then the wine. She took a tentative chew, then smiled. When she had finished, she confessed, “That’s good.”

“And you didn’t want to have a couple of snorts with me. You would never have learned that—something you can use for the rest of your days—from good ol’ Whatsisname.”

Her eyes showed she didn’t like that.

“You were telling me what your sister the shrink told you,” she said.

“You really want to know?”

“Yeah,” Susan said thoughtfully. “I suppose I do.”

“She said that I should remember that

what I did was an act of self-preservation, rather than an act of willful violence. And that self-preservation is one of the basic subconscious urges, right up there with sexual desire, over which man has very little control.”

I just made that up. I must be getting to be a pretty good liar. Or, more kindly, actor. When Amy came to me in her Sigmund Freud role after I shot the late Mr. Warren K. Fletcher in the back of his head, I told her to butt out.

And Susie seems to be swallowing it whole.

“And, of course, in that case, the act of homicide had an undeniably desirable social by-product.”

“And what does that mean?”

“When he tried to run me over he had a naked housewife tied up with lamp cord under a tarpaulin in the back of his truck.”

“Come on!” Susan said, almost scornfully.

Matt held up his right hand, pinky and thumb touching, the others extended. “Boy Scout’s honor,” he said. “And there was no moral question in that woman’s mind whether or not I should have shot him. He had been telling her all the interesting things he was going to do to her just as soon as they got out of town.”

“In other words, so far as you’re concerned, it’s morally permissible to take human life under certain circumstances—for a greater good?”

Matt bit off the answer that started to form on his lips, and instead said, “Have another cracker, Susan.”

“We’re changing the subject, are we? What happened, did you run out of sardonic witticisms?”

Yeah, for some reason I sensed that it was time to change the subject. I have no idea how, but I knew that line of conversation was dangerous.

“I guess so. You can go home to Mommy and Daddy, Susan. I don’t like the conversation anymore.”

Her face colored, and for a moment Matt thought she was about to push herself out of her chair and march out of the room.