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Three intelligent and attractive young women are each pursuing her own version of the American dream.  But the achievement of those life goals does not come easily.  How is it that Evelyn, blessed with exquisitely sculpted cheekbones and perfectly shaped buttocks, ends up with a lying, thieving, sleazebag drug addict for a husband?  How did Marcy - so practical, ambitious, and rigidly conformist - get trapped in a meaningless affair and become hated by her entire family?  And why is a nice Jewish girl from Queens like Rebecca sprawled out on a greasy, oil stained pavement next to a highway in southern California wearing a crotchless fishnet body stocking and four-inch heels?

The intertwined lives of these three women are destined to be forever changed by the fateful consequences of a suspicious suicide. It is Rebecca who, despite her slacker tendencies, decides that she needs to get to the bottom of the mysterious death, and it is she who opens a Pandora's box from which bursts forth a whirling maelstrom of greed, adultery, and murder.  This unlikely heroine courageously takes on incompetent cops, unscrupulous lawyers, and dangerous thugs, while also dealing with a skittish boyfriend, a formidable rival, and her depressed mother.  By the end of the book, who did what has become clear, but the lines between hero and victim and villain have become blurred.

 THE RIGHT BAIT

After a six-month probationary period, Rebecca was granted access to Roger's bed.  Though this was a major breakthrough in that the couple was now officially sleeping together, Roger had no intention of unlocking his chastity belt; no contact between their private parts was permitted.  Rebecca remained obedient to Roger's commandments, but she eventually took the liberty of pleasuring herself with Roger at her side, at first while he lay sleeping, later on when he was fully awake.  They were both aware that, from an outsider's perspective, this type of sexual relationship was likely to be viewed as kind of sick, but the constraints and dynamics of the situation dictated that it was an acceptable solution to the problem of Rebecca's unsatisfied urges.  Roger was in agreement with her that there was no reason that she should be ashamed of her desires, and there was no need to hide her satisfaction of them from her closest friend in the world.  He was rigid and moralistic, but he did not consider himself to be a prude; on the contrary, he prided himself on being extraordinarily open minded.  Nevertheless he declined Rebecca's invitation to reciprocate, and chose not to share with her whatever steps he was taking to relieve any of his own accumulated sexual tensions.  And so Roger became accustomed to dropping off to sleep to the soft buzz of Rebecca's vibrator, the gentle shaking of the bedstead, and the sound of Rebecca's strangled suspirations.  For Rebecca, it was still almost unbearably frustrating.  She was proud that she had been given a promotion, but it felt as if the upgrade in her position had only advanced her from the custodian's closet to the mailroom.  But she fought back her bitterness, restrained herself whenever she was tempted to start humping Roger's leg, and did her best to smile about the situation.  She told Roger that she was having more fun in bed than she had had in many of her previous relationships.

Thus, the many months of deprivation slowly turned into years of deprivation, through which Rebecca suffered with a remarkably good grace, so that they were sometimes a tolerable purgatory, and not always pure hell.  She took full advantage of the honesty clause in their contract to get in some good shots of her own.  "You're such a control freak that you deny yourself sex just so you can feel as if you're in charge of this relationship," was a typical accusation.  Furthermore, a part of her enjoyed the freedom that comes with asexuality, freedom from the pressure that is brought to bear upon a relationship when the sexual interaction between the partners is a critical component of the bond between them.  Of course, it was not as if the sexual chess game had been removed from the table.  As is commonly the case in an unconsummated relationship, the awareness of the potential for a future sexual union exercises as powerful an influence over the relationship as does the carnal knowledge acquired by lovers who are actively copulating.  In any event, Rebecca enjoyed teasing and tormenting her sexually stingy companion as much as possible, within the loosely defined bounds of fair play.

She even went so far as to challenge directly Roger's demands for fidelity, shaking her chains by indulging in lesbian sex.  Harmony Suskind was a fellow student at New York Law who had been in a couple of Rebecca's study groups.  She was pale, underweight, and timid, and she spoke and carried herself with a refined manner.  Harmony was not snobby or superior, but Rebecca had written her off as a spoiled rich kid, and the two women had never gotten together on any purely social occasion.  Harmony lived at home with her parents in a building on Central Park West with a uniformed doorman and a uniformed elevator operator, in a spacious, immaculately clean, and tastefully decorated apartment.  Her bedroom had a magnificent view of the park.  Largely for reasons of geographical convenience, during their third year of law school she and Rebecca agreed to study together for the New York State bar exam.  Their preparations for the day of reckoning that loomed on the horizon entailed spending many hours alone together, quite often enough sprawled across Harmony's queen sized bed among the mounds of study materials and case files.  Harmony, like Rebecca, was an only child, and she was clearly suffocated by her parents, whose sedulous subservience was difficult for her to bear.  She unconsciously betrayed a less attractive side of her personality with her intolerance toward their querulous intrusions; the depth of her repugnance could be extrapolated with mathematical precision from the degree of annoyance in her voice when she pointedly talked down to them, or from the dramatic and conspiratorial roll of her eyes that invariably followed each one of their exits from her room.  Rebecca and Harmony could hardly have been more dissimilar in terms of personality or appearance, but they did share some similar perspectives on their life experiences, one being that they each had an extremely low opinion of their parents.  On more than one occasion, one of Harmony's sardonic remarks triggered a bizarre, parricidal contest, an orgy of ingratitude and repudiation, in which they would compete to see who could enumerate a greater number of parental failings.  But Harmony always held the trump card: "At least they didn't brand you with some 1960s hippy dippy flower power name that would be laughed at for generations to come."  

"Oh I think Harmony's a beautiful name," Rebecca would reply, though in fact she thought it ridiculous.  (How hard could it be to get it changed? she wondered.)  And Rebecca would have been obliged to admit that she did love the sound of her own name.  In that regard, she was truly grateful to her parents.  Unlike the Suskinds, they at least had had the foresight to refrain from conferring upon her a name like Sunshine or Jewel or Felicity that was destined to become a silly anachronism, yet another thing that she could hate about herself. 

Before she had even broached the subject with her study mate, Rebecca sought and obtained official pre-clearance from Roger for the homosexual affair.  It was difficult for her to substantiate for him the exact means by which she had established that her clairvoyant request for an exemption from standard policy was going to be necessary.  Rebecca knew that her study partner wasn't seeing anybody.  Beyond that, she didn't have much to go on, only some subtle signals picked up on her radar - the duration of a touch, a few extra microseconds of eye contact, a fleeting furrowed brow left behind by an unasked question - together creating a gestalt from which Rebecca was able to draw the inference that any advances she made in the direction of physical intimacy would not be rebuffed.  And once she had received an assurance from Roger that such a satellite relationship was not too threatening for him to handle, it became something of a self fulfilling prophecy.

Despite her state of sexual starvation, Rebecca was nervous about exploring this new frontier, and she exercised admirable restraint by not immediately pouncing upon her new prey.  Instead, the two women gradually allowed the tenor of their physical contacts to slip slowly and gracefully across one line after another until they found themselves in one clearly compromising position after another, and undeniably engaged in the increasingly moist, vigorous, and groan inducing business of mutual sexual stimulation.  The process was deliciously exciting.  The taboos fell gently by the wayside, not unlike the articles of clothing that fell softly on the carpeted floor.  They didn't much talk about it, especially in the early going.  They simply allowed it to happen.

As she had promised she would, Rebecca duly reported back to Roger in full detail about every development with her new conquest.  In pursuing the affair with Harmony, she was sincerely motivated by a ferocious, seething libido that was dying to be uncaged.  And yet it had indeed occurred to her that a small dose of competition might be just what she needed to encourage Roger to do the right thing.  Rebecca's sensitive and intuitive orchestration of Roger's response to the triangulation of their relationship was absolutely magnificent, worthy of a true virtuoso of the human heartstrings.  Through vigilant self monitoring, she remained focused on her objective: to intrigue and titillate without ever being too threatening.  She made it crystal clear that, as far as she was concerned, homosexual love between two women was an enjoyable pastime, but a poor substitute for what she knew he had to offer, so that it only made her lust for him more strongly.  She bent over backward to avoid any passing remark that might put him on the defensive, but taunted him with the suggestion that, if he played his cards right, she might be able to wangle him an invitation to a ménage à trois.

She overplayed it a bit, as was her wont.  For one thing, she talked about Harmony too frequently.  It was not so much that she was obsessed with the girl.  The problem was that she couldn't help flaunting her as an exclusive possession over which he had no control.  Roger had stripped Rebecca of so many of her inalienable rights that she had to push his face into this small slice of freedom that she had succeeded in carving out for herself.  Other slips occurred during the course of her faithful recreations of her conversations and interplay with Harmony, which were not always one hundred percent accurate.  In painting the picture of her relationship with Harmony, she took a few artistic licenses, sometimes for propaganda purposes.  "Harmony doesn't think I'm overweight," she claimed.  (This was another subject upon which Roger had felt obligated to furnish Rebecca with some honest feedback.)  "She says that my body is 'exquisitely sexually alluring.'"

Despite the danger of a negative impact upon Roger of such an occasional loss of self restraint in depicting the affair with her colleague, its overall salutary influence upon Roger's psyche, and the degree to which it enabled her to manipulate his emotions, went far beyond what she had dared hope to achieve.  Her vivid, pornographic reports about what was taking place in the apartment on Central Park West made him intensely sexually curious, to say the least.  Sometimes he had to cross his legs in an attempt to mask the degree of his interest in Rebecca's remembrances of how she had spent her lunch break.  At work, on the subway, or in the middle of a conversation he would find his train of thought interrupted by the fantasies engendered by Rebecca's erotically charged recapitulation of her previous day's coupling as well as her frank innuendoes about future opportunities for him to witness at first hand, and maybe even participate in, her daring exploration of same sex love.  It made him perceive her as more desirable.  It made him want to have sexual intercourse with her, to possess her sexually.  It made him wish that he had not given Rebecca permission to embark upon the affair.  It made him afraid that he was going to be replaced in her affections and abruptly abandoned.

Roger first met Harmony at a Chinese restaurant on Columbus Avenue.  Rebecca observed him closely as he shook hands with her study mate, noting that his cheeks colored and he seemed more flustered and socially inept than usual; his salutations were garbled and barely comprehensible.  She had told Roger, truthfully, that she had told Harmony, untruthfully, that she had told Roger nothing about how she and Harmony amused themselves during their study breaks.  Harmony had also not been apprised that she was Rebecca's first sex partner in the last two years.  After he became less tongue tied, Roger proceeded to make a complete jackass out of himself, seeking to assert his dominance and establish his intellectual superiority by quizzing the two law students on some of the more subtle ramifications of the legal code they had been attempting to pound into their brains for the previous twelve hours.  Rebecca swiftly intuited that Roger had, like her, found some sexual appeal in the pale, slender, will-o'-the-wisp hovering across the table from them.  And she took it to be a confirmation of her suspicions when her soul mate and mentor allowed one or two slighting remarks toward his doting apprentice to drop from his lips, speaking as if she were not even present: "I'm sure Rebecca has no idea what I'm talking about, but…" blah blah blah. 

Rebecca checked the body language under the table.  Roger was jiggling his knee furiously, while Harmony's legs were double entwined around each other.  Wouldn't it be fun to see the reaction on Harmony's face if Rebecca started playing a little footsie?  No.  No.  No.  Wait a minute.  What was Harmony saying?  "Wouldn't you first have to file a motion to vacate the original judgment?"  Harmony's lips thinned into a near smile as she cocked her head and crinkled her brow archly. 

"Why of course that would be the first step," Roger blustered, backpedaling, his cheeks reddening once again.  This was so beautiful.  She nailed the fucker!  Right on, girl!  Rebecca had been toying with the idea of inviting Roger to come over and help them "study" one evening, but his apparent attraction to Harmony, his boorish attempts to show off, and his traitorous slurs shut down that strategy in a hurry.  If he had been entertaining any hopes for a ménage à trois, then he had blown it big time.  He could go fuck himself, as far as Rebecca was concerned.  More important, however, was Rebecca's realization of just how twisted Roger had become over her relationship with Harmony.  The shark inside her could smell blood.

These changes in Roger's psychological state were accompanied by parallel developments in the real estate sector that conspired to overthrow the sexually repressive tyranny under which Rebecca had been forced to live.  One of the reasons that Roger had advanced for his prohibition against sex between roommates was that it posed a risk to the harmonious environment that prevailed in the apartment on West Ninety-Eighth Street.  Despite Roger's circumspection and the heroic sacrifices that he was making to avoid any unpleasantness, the roommate situation in the shared apartment was destined to become quite ugly.  It started with a piece of news that is music to the ears of almost any renter in a New York City apartment.  Toward the end of the summer after Rebecca's second year of law school, a rumor was confirmed that the building was "going co-op."  Such real estate transactions commonly create a financial windfall for renters because they are offered an opportunity to purchase their apartments at a price that is substantially less than its market value.  And in fact Roger's diligent research and careful review of the preliminary offering plan established that the insider price for the apartment was $97,000 less than its fair market value.  At the house meeting that was convened at the end of September, Roger evenhandedly declared that they should either purchase the apartment collectively or negotiate a buyout agreement in which each departing tenant would receive $24,250 in compensation for his or her rights to the property.

The interested parties retired to their respective corners to contemplate the relationship between his or her destiny and the future ownership of that fifth floor apartment on West Ninety-Eighth Street.  Despite Roger's efforts to lay the groundwork for a perfectly equitable and mutually satisfactory agreement, it proved nearly impossible to schedule a follow-up meeting in which to bring closure to the group's decision.  It was not until the end of November that it became apparent that Will was not on board with the dispensation that Roger had advocated.  Will's notion was that the apartment was well suited for the purpose of providing a comfortable nest for the family that he wanted to start with his girlfriend Christine.  Toward that end, Will's proposal was that he would pay each of his fellow tenants $7500, he would purchase the apartment as sole owner, and he would allow them to continue living there for a negotiable period of time.  Will adduced a series of marginally relevant factors, such as his seniority with respect to duration of residency, his occupancy of the largest bedroom, and the position of his signature on the lease, as the basis for the priority status he deserved to be allocated with respect to the purchase agreement.  Roger assiduously prepared a comprehensive rebuttal of Will's argument, and at a follow-up meeting that started out as tense and still as a funeral but ended up as heated and vociferous as a prize fight, Roger literally and figuratively ripped Will's offer to shreds.  Roger reiterated his considered opinion as to what would constitute a fair and reasonable agreement.  Will asserted in no uncertain terms that the only option, other than his offer, was the status quo; since the landlord's proposal was a "non-eviction plan," there was a clause in the prospectus which granted tenants the right to continue paying their current monthly rent under the condition that they forfeit the opportunity to purchase the apartment at the insider price.

Will worked for a small firm that rented lighting equipment and cameras to film companies that were shooting in the New York area.  Christine worked for a company that sold cosmetics and personal health care products, and her job responsibilities there were vaguely and unfailingly described as "sales support."  The bottom line was that Will would have trouble coming up with the down payment on the apartment, and did not have an extra seventy-five grand stashed away to buy out his fellow tenants.  Roger, on the other hand, believed that one should live frugally and save for the future, and he had adequate cash reserves for both the down payment and the buyout.  Because of his employment record, decent salary, and unblemished credit history, he would have no difficulty securing a loan with which to purchase the apartment.  Furthermore, he had Rebecca at his side, a staunch ally.  Roger wrote Will a letter in which he eloquently pleaded for reasonableness, and adjured his roommate "to act in everyone's best interest."  At the same time, he discreetly approached Kevin, a man whom he had described to Rebecca as a "sleazebag," and sought to convince him that his most profitable course of action would be to join ranks with Roger and Rebecca in order to present Will with a united front.  However, Kevin, the fourth signee on the lease, had already formed an unholy alliance with Will, who had lured Kevin to his side with a string of promises that included several years of rent free living, Roger's bedroom - the second largest in the apartment, and a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

The household was governed by consensus, and was not a democratic state; all four signatures were required to effect a decision regarding the co-op, and so Kevin's allegiance did not carry with it any real political power; the only impact it might have upon the outcome of the negotiations would be largely psychological.  But that was exactly the direction in which the conflict over the fate of the apartment was headed; it became a nasty psychological game and a battle of the wills.  The atmosphere inside the apartment became decidedly unpleasant.  Rebecca had always gotten along with Christine, who had been born in Queens, and lived there until her parents moved to Putnam County.  Christine's brother had attended the same Catholic school as some of the Italian kids from Rebecca's project.  Once Roger's courtship of Kevin ended, however, the battle lines had been drawn and there was no longer any such thing as a civil conversation across those lines.  Household management issues that had been handled smoothly for years suddenly became a bone of contention.  Every day, Roger and Rebecca had to decide whether they would prefer either to stand passively in a hailstorm of vituperation or to participate actively in a shouting match about a fabricated problem with regard to access to the bathroom, taking out the garbage, the purchase of household staples, cleaning up the kitchen, etcetera.  It was not difficult to see through Will's strategy; if he could make their lives miserable enough, then Roger and Rebecca would be willing to leave with little or no compensation, and would therefore accede to the terms of his offer.

There was a good chance that the final real estate prospectus, which would impose a ninety day deadline, would be arriving before the new year, and so Roger decided to launch a major counteroffensive.  He sent Will a registered letter in which he cited Christine's permanent residency in the apartment as a clear violation of the lease and demanded that she vacate the premises immediately and pay thousands of dollars in restitution for unpaid rent, threatening legal action if they failed to comply.  The composition of this letter - including strategic discussions between Roger and Rebecca, supporting legal research, and the actual production of the document - consumed virtually every minute of their leisure time over a period of nearly three weeks.  Roger believed that it was time well spent, since it would place Will under strong pressure to agree to an equitable settlement.  Possessed of far more substantial financial resources and far superior legal expertise, Roger was confident that the principles of justice and fair play, on whose side he squarely stood, were bound to prevail over the forces of selfishness and greed.

However, as the United States Army has learned on a number of occasions, it is nearly impossible to win a war against enemy guerrillas, even if they are less well armed, when they have much more at stake, and are fighting to defend their home turf.  Will did not deign to respond directly to Roger's missive, but he interpreted the letter as an outright declaration of war.  There was an immediate escalation of hostilities, starting with a dual pronged attack: the usurpation of all of the common space in the apartment - living room, kitchen, and bath; and an assault upon Rebecca and Roger's ears in the form of loud rap music played all hours of the day and night.  Thanks to the intercession of the downstairs neighbor, who took to banging on his ceiling, the volume at which Will was broadcasting his highly repetitive party mix was modestly reduced after about thirty-six hours; but that slight respite was quickly supplanted by a protracted invasion, every weekday night until at least 11 p.m. and all weekend long, by hordes of rowdy, hard drinking house guests.  This invading force greatly facilitated the efforts of Will, Kevin, and Christine to monopolize every shared room in the apartment, constantly cooking and eating in the kitchen, constantly blasting the television and stereo in the living room, constantly laughing and screaming in the hallways, and constantly blockading the bathroom door.  This battalion of carousers had been instructed to make themselves at home and to treat Roger and Rebecca with cold disdain, as if they were the unwanted intruders.  Will and Christine had apparently made a death pact that they would never set foot outside the apartment unless absolutely necessary, and they made a special effort to schedule their utilization of the bathroom so as to interfere maximally with Roger and Rebecca's morning ablutions and sabotage as completely as possible their attempts to leave the house in a timely manner.  Roger became accustomed to brushing his teeth and shaving in the kitchen sink, for which he received a great deal of verbal abuse, and to taking his showers and moving his bowels at 5 a.m.  When challenged by Roger about any aspect of his use of the apartment, Will became instantly furious over Roger's infringement of his personal rights, and would indicate that he was more than willing to resolve the matter by engaging in the gentlemanly art of fisticuffs.  Aside from Roger's disinclination, both natural and entrained, to settle disputes by violent means, he was further dissuaded from adopting that approach because Will's disadvantages with respect to financial wherewithal, intellectual acumen, and legal training were partially offset by a significant advantage with respect to physique, to the tune of approximately four inches in height and forty pounds of body weight.

Will, Kevin, and Christine were able to sustain the nonstop partying for only about two months, from the week before Christmas to the latter part of February, after which the invasion markedly abated.  It had been quite long enough, however, to prove their point: that they could and would convert the apartment into a war zone and make life utterly miserable for Roger and Rebecca.  Even without Will's friends and relatives constantly under foot, the atmosphere in the apartment had become simply unbearable.  Roger and Rebecca had adopted a siege mentality, and remained holed up in their rooms whenever they were at home.  Their closets had become food pantries, since any private supplies left unattended in the kitchen were likely to be swiftly consumed.  Every interaction between the warring factions was rife with tension, and the occasional attempt at a superficially normal conversation was undermined by the unresolved conflict that lay barely beneath the surface, like a hungry, submerged crocodile lurking at the edge of a lagoon.  Expectations of a resolution to the hostilities were further delayed because the landlord was required to make some revisions to the offering plan, and the final prospectus was not filed until late February.

Roger spent most of the month of March pondering whether to file criminal charges and bring a civil suit against Will and his cronies on account of their disorderly conduct and the harassment to which he and Rebecca were being subjected.  The mathematics didn't really add up.  Even if he were victorious, by no means a foregone conclusion, the damages were not likely to exceed $25,000 for each plaintiff, and Will was already offering $7500.  Was it really worth involving oneself in such a protracted, arduous, and acrimonious law suit?  Only if you were strongly motivated by the spirit of vindictiveness.  And if it was revenge that they wanted, all they had to do was stay in the apartment until June and, out of spite, refuse to sign off on the shareholder agreement.  Then no one would get the apartment at the insider price.  One thing about which Roger was convinced, however, was that any legal action against Will would require that he and Rebecca be ready to clear out of the apartment.  The situation would just get too ugly.  Though often tempted, Roger had only twice lodged a complaint with the police over the course of the reign of terror.  On one Saturday night, the apartment was as crowded as a subway car at rush hour, and both the body count and the noise level were more than he could stand.  When he politely requested a reduction in the volume of the stereo, the only response that he received was a rhythmic chorus of "Ass-hole!  Ass-hole!  Ass-hole!"  On the other occasion, his sleep was disrupted in the wee hours by the sound of breaking glass and overturned furniture, and it sounded as if the crimes against nature that were being committed in the living room had strayed well beyond the pale of civilization.  (Parenthetically, the fact that Will and his "invading army of degenerate thugs," as they were described to the police, were able to interrupt Roger's sleep at all was in itself no small accomplishment.  Rebecca had often witnessed, in awe and disbelief, the impervious tranquility with which Roger slept through virtually any disturbance of a lesser magnitude than the sort of explosion that might be produced by the detonation of an atomic bomb.  Rebecca's orgasms were hard to miss for anyone in a two-block radius, but Roger had no trouble snoring right through them.  Roger usually interpreted the soundness of his repose as a reward for his unblemished conscience, although Rebecca did venture to suggest that such exemplary peacefulness might also be a natural side effect of being prematurely deceased.)  

At any rate, after the appearance of the police at the front door, Roger had been heaped with invective for days on end: "What a sick fuck!  Calling the cops on your own roommates!"  Thus Roger had concluded that he and Rebecca would have to vacate the premises before initiating any court proceedings.  A further consideration was that Rebecca was right smack in the middle of her last semester of law school, attempting to study for one of the most notoriously difficult examinations ever devised by mankind.

For Rebecca, the whole experience was far less traumatic and distressing than it was for Roger.  Although her significant other was duly impressed by her courage and indomitable spirit, the truth of the matter was that, by maintaining a broad perspective on the internecine warfare by which she was surrounded, Rebecca was able to see the silver lining in the storm clouds that swirled around her.  Though Roger was always the primary target of Will's attacks, the personal animosity directed toward her, the riot that was continually in progress in the living room, and the manufactured disturbances of the household schedule were, of course, bothersome.  Nevertheless, a secondary effect of all the time and effort that Rebecca and Roger were investing in intrigue and gossip, of the hundreds of whispered secrets that they shared, and of the countless hours that they spent secretly plotting against their common enemy, was the reinforcement of the bonds cementing their relationship.  Nor was Rebecca particularly rattled by the interference with her studies caused by the ongoing brouhaha outside her bedroom door.  For one thing, she was doing much of her studying in the graceful splendor, comfort, and serenity of Dr. Suskind's sprawling Central Park West residence.  For another thing, Rebecca welcomed the distraction with open arms.  She hated studying for the bar exam, and she still had strong doubts about whether she wanted to be a lawyer at all.  She had a real bad feeling about taking the test, an emotional response that she readily recognized as fear of failure.  Whenever she envisioned herself actually sitting down to write the exam, she became queasy and a little shaky, as if she were about to pass out, an involuntary reaction that did not augur well for her exam performance   Roger assured her that it was a good sign, and that the adrenaline circulating through her brain would enhance her mental acuity and test taking skills when the big day rolled around in July.  Rebecca wasn't so sure about that. 

It all came together for Rebecca by the end of April.  The competitive pressure of her sexual adventures with Harmony had been rankling Roger for months.  He well realized that her patient subservience as his chaste companion barely masked the simmering resentment that continued to build with each orgasm that she achieved without his assistance.  But it was Will, his implacable foe, with his sinister smile, his disingenuous imitation of a fairminded human being, and his frighteningly violent outbursts who finally pushed Roger into Rebecca's arms.  It was on a Saturday evening, with the party in the living room in full swing, that Roger and Rebecca held a top secret conference during which he gravely acknowledged, and she concurred, that it simply was not worth it to them to live constantly in an atmosphere of hostility, cohabitating with people whom they now very much disliked and who fully reciprocated their feelings.  The sensible thing to do was to take Will's fifteen thousand dollars and put it toward an apartment where he and Rebecca could make a fresh start and embark upon a happy and fulfilling life together.  Needless to say, Rebecca came to the conclusion, after careful consideration, that Roger's weighty proposal was their only reasonable course of action.  It was the most glorious defeat she had ever suffered.  And they celebrated their wise and momentous decision with the first act of sexual congress in which they both fully participated.  Roger, ever willing to defer joy, at first suggested that they wait until they were safely ensconced in their new abode, but Rebecca, waxing enthusiastic, demanded a taste of the loving that she had worked so hard and so long to earn.  Roger did manage to add the stipulation, before his trousers had been fully removed, that she and Harmony would be henceforth obligated to cease and desist from any study activities, particularly those involving cunnilingus, that were not directly related to the bar exam.  After two-and-a-half years of preparatory fantasizing, it could be pretty well guaranteed that Roger and Rebecca's first actual attempt at mating would be somewhat anticlimactic.  All of the anger by which they were surrounded was not conducive to lovemaking, a distraction to which Roger attributed the initial physical reluctance of his body, if not his soul, to merge seamlessly with Rebecca's on that historic evening.  Rebecca especially disliked the fact that Roger repeatedly urged her to muffle her moans of pleasure.  As she gyrated in rhythm with the barbaric howling that was emanating from the living room and seeping through the bedroom wall, she felt that it was pointless, and also not very sporting, to ask her to suppress her own grunts of ecstasy.  But they would have plenty of time to work on improving the methodology by which they produced mutual pleasure, and Rebecca was definitely up to the task.

The news that Roger and Rebecca were willing to accept Will's offer did wonders in terms of easing the rancor and tension that had infused every word, glance, or gesture of interpersonal interaction among the warring housemates for the past six months.  Will was eventually able to cough up the money to buy out the happy couple, but raising the cash was apparently a significant financial strain.  Christine confided in Rebecca that her credit cards, like those of Will, Kevin, and Will's brother (an incoming subtenant) were all completely maxed out.  Roger, finding himself in a rather strong negotiating position, saw fit to exact a bit of revenge for the months of suffering that he and Rebecca had endured.  He sternly rejected Will's proposal that the final month's rent be subtracted from the buyout payment, and he forced Will to make restitution for a variety of food supplies and personal articles - carefully documented in a four-by-six spiral notebook - that had been stolen or damaged over the course of the hostilities.  Finally, he demanded that Will make a formal public apology, at the final house meeting, for his offensive and disrespectful behavior to Rebecca and himself.  When Will balked at being subjected to this indignity, Roger felt obliged to show off his tough side: "Fine!  Then you can keep your lousy fifteen thousand dollars," he threatened, a hair's breadth away from calling off the deal. 

In the end, Will submitted to his punishment, though his apology was sneering and halfhearted.  "Don't go away mad," he platitudinously quipped, "just go away."  Everybody laughed, but the laughter was hollow and nervous.