"She turned her head, young, pale, with enormous black eyes. She looked at me, but she didn't see me. I saw her: the round smooth face and the deep black eyes and the full curved glossy mouth, a red underlip protruding in a pout that flicked at your libido despite the flung-about furniture and the dead man turned to the ceiling and the narrow wind pushing in through the broken window and the blue gun in both her hands."

Meet Stella, whose eighteen-year-old cry is that Cleopatra was Queen of Egypt at seventeen.

Stella, who makes the merely voluptuous seem passé. But then, she is only a teen-ager, and doesn't even a Private Richard have a conscience?