Summary
A dust-blown whistle-stop town, its only glamour the flicker of a marquee promising celluloid elsewhere, births Linda Catherton—luminous, threadbare, voracious for the gilded cage she calls security. She stalks receptions like a couture shark, nets Roland Bland, scarred roué whose notoriety perfumes the air with danger and dividends. Their contract is inked in mutual cynicism: she will wear his ring, he will wear her arm, and the exit toll—alimony—will ransom her youth once boredom sets. Yet the honeymoon train, rattling through moonlit nowhere, mutates into a silver confession booth; laughter softens into whispered vulnerabilities, and the arithmetic of greed collapses under the weight of accidental tenderness. Back home, Fontaine—Teddy’s insolvent, indiscreet groom—unearths a letter in which Linda’s mercenary heart is spelled out in merciless cursive. He mails it like a bomb. Roland, stung, serves his wife divorce papers soaked in gall, but swears to murder the postman of their misery. Before the ink dries, Fontaine’s corpse adorns the riverbank, throat a violet bloom of treachery. Suspicion ricochets between the Catherton-Blands, two lovers who suddenly excel at reading guilt in each other’s irises. Enter Ishtar Lane, ghost from Roland’s riotous past, a bruised romantic who reasons that eradicating the messenger will cauterize the marriage he still covets. One scream later, Ishtar expires in a tableau of thwarted passion, leaving the couple clutching each other amid the rubble of their machinations—wealth now meaningless, coupons cashed in for something rawer: the terror of actually needing a human being.
Synopsis
Linda Catherton, a poor small town girl in search of a wealthy suitor, meets Roland Bland, a man of notorious reputation, at the wedding of her friend Teddy Beaudine. Although she does not love him, Linda accepts his marriage proposal, believing that alimony will compensate her eventually for the unhappy experiment; but following their honeymoon she acknowledges their mutual love and affection. Fontaine, Teddy's husband, who is in debt, discovers a letter from Linda indicating her real intentions in marriage and sends it to Roland, who then gives his wife grounds for a divorce but threatens to kill the informer. When Fontaine is killed, Linda and Roland suspect each other, but it develops that Ishtar Lane, who formerly loved Roland, committed the murder, hoping thus to assure his own happiness. Ishtar dies, and the couple are reconciled.
