Badge of Evil Read Online Free PDF Page B

such moments were in actuality from the fictions most people seemed to believe. “Well,” she sighed, “I wish I hadn’t spent all that time polishing the good silver. It’s just another night, after all.”
    “We can still have our little party, just the three of us.” He grimaced. “There’s no reason that this has to upset all our plans.”
    “That’s right.” Connie matched his air of forced gaiety. “To heck with everybody. You’re not working now and you’re mine — for tonight, anyway.”
    “Right. We’ll have dinner, put some records on and spend the evening pretending we’re independently wealthy and don’t have to work for the public.”
    They went at it determinedly but it didn’t fool anybody except their daughter, who enjoyed parties of any description. Despite the “company” silver and the special dishes and the candlelight, it was — as Connie had predicted — just another night. And the hollowness of the celebration was emphasized after dinner when Connie telephoned her father in Ensenada to tell him that they wouldn’t be coming, after all. The conversation, in rapid-fire Spanish, was beyond Holt’s elementary grasp of the language, but enough American phrases were sprinkled in so that he could follow the sense of it. He admired the way Connie could shift lingual gears, sometimes in mid-sentence, going from one tongue to the other and back again without even a pause. He realized that Connie was telling her father not to expect them anytime in the near future. Afterwards, he challenged this.
    “There’s no use kidding ourselves,” his wife told him. “I know what happens when you get on a case.”
    “This isn’t the ordinary case. I’m just window dressing this time. McCoy and Quinlan will probably wrap it up in a day.” He related the way things stood, emphasizing the open-and-shut aspects as they had been told to him by the two detectives. “So you can see there’s no real problem to it.”
    To his surprise, Connie shook her head calmly. “It’s not that simple, Mitch. That isn’t the way it happened. Those two kids — Tara and her sweetheart — didn’t kill her father. I’ve read all about it in the paper.”
    He couldn’t help laughing. “Oh, come on now, Connie. The newspapers don’t know anything about it. I’ll back McCoy’s experience any day.”
    “Anybody can make a mistake. For goodness’ sake, it’s a matter of common sense. Things just don’t happen that way. Girls fall in love every day with men their parents don’t approve of, and marry them, too, without the approval. They don’t have to kill their father to do it, not in this day and age. McCoy’s talking like this is the Middle Ages or something.”
    “You can’t generalize about people.”
    “That’s what McCoy and Quinlan and you are doing, isn’t it? How about me, as a good example? Papa didn’t exactly do handsprings when I decided to marry you. In fact, I remember practically being told never to darken his door again.” Connie grinned. “Of course, now he thinks that you’re too good for me. He asked me again tonight if I’d managed to fatten you up any.”
    “Did Papa Grande say anything about my pony?” asked Nancy eagerly.
    “Your pony will be there when we are,” Connie told her. “And now, young lady, it’s past your bedtime.” This produced the usual argument that ended in the usual way and after Nancy had reluctantly marched off, Connie returned to the larger argument with her husband. “I married you, Mitch, and I didn’t kill anybody to do it — and I’m supposed to be the hot-blooded Latin type.”
    “There’s a difference. Tara Linneker stood to inherit two million bucks.”
    “Oh, that’s ridiculous. A girl in love doesn’t even think about money. I didn’t, and Papa isn’t the poorest man in the world. Is Tara Linneker so different? You’ve met her.”
    “I don’t say Tara planned this thing. She probably didn’t. But this Shayon