Death Before Bedtime Read Online Free PDF

alecks those newspaper people are … just between you and me and the lamp post.… I hope you won’t quote me.” She smiled, terribly.
    “I know what you mean,” I said, averting my eyes.
    “Lee has such courage,” she added irrelevantly, sniffing her brandy like a terrier at a rat’s hole. “Take tonight. He actually thinks he can win over that young Communist from New York who’s writing a piece about him. He is fearless … but he should keep people like that at a distance.”
    “Perhaps the Senator needs someone to save him from himself,” I suggested.
    “How right you are, Mr. Schroeder.”
    “Sargeant.”
    “I mean Mr. Sargeant. Then you must remember that I’m not exactly
pro
-Rhodes.” This last information was said with a shrewd wink which struck me as being oddly unpleasant.
    “I thought you were on his committee.” Rhodes had given me to understand that Miss Pruitt would deliver the women of America on Election Day.
    “Wheels within wheels,” said Verbena Pruitt rising to her feet. “But now I must be off to my beauty sleep.” And, like Lady Macbeth, she sailed out of the room.
    I finished off my brandy slowly. Then, wondering whether or not I should look in on Ellen, I walked up the dimly lit staircase. I was just recalling that I had no idea where her bedroom was when a figure stepped out of the shadows on the first landing. I gave a jump.
    “Hope I didn’t startle you,” said Rufus Hollister smoothly, emerging from the darkened doorway, where he had been standing, into the faint lamplight. He was still dressed.
    “Not at all,” I said.
    “The Senator just phoned me … on the house phone. He’s working late … never lets up … secret of his success … nose to the grindstone.” I was pelted with saws.
    “I’ll see you in the morning,” I said, edging away. I didn’t get very far, though. The next thing I knew I was on the floor, in Mr. Hollister’s arms, an enormous gold-framed mirror in fragments about us as the whole house rocked back and forth while a sound like thunder or the atomic bomb deafened us and put out all the lights.
    They picked a fine moment to bomb Washington was my first conscious thought. My second thought was to checkmyself in the dark for broken bones. I was all in one piece, I decided, though my cheek was bleeding … from the broken glass. Then the shouts and shrieks began. I heard Mr. Hollister cursing in the dark near me, heard the tinkle of glass as he got to his feet and brushed himself off. Then, from all directions, candles appeared, held by servants, by Mrs. Rhodes, by Miss Pruitt, who was standing in the corridor with the Pomeroys. No one knew what had happened. Not until an hour later did we find out, when a police official addressed us in the drawing room.
    It was a curious scene.
    A dozen candelabras cast a cool yellow light over the room, making long shadows on the floor. The house party and the servants, in various states of dress and undress, sat in a circle about the police lieutenant, a young man named Winters who stood sternly between two uniformed policemen and surveyed his audience.
    “In the first place,” he said, glaring for some inexplicable reason at Verbena Pruitt, “Senator Rhodes is dead.” Mrs. Rhodes, who had already been informed, sat very straight in her chair, her face expressionless. Ellen sat beside her, her eyes shut. The others looked stunned by what had happened. And what
had
happened?
    “Some time between nine o’clock yesterday morning and one-thirty-six this morning, a small container of a special new explosive, Pomeroy 5X, was hidden behind some logs in the fireplace of the Senator’s study.” There was a gasp. Ellen opened her eyes very wide. Mr. Pomeroy stirred uneasily; his wife chewed her lip nervously. Verbena Pruitt was nearly as impassive as Mrs. Rhodes: she had been through too many political battles to be unnerved by such a small thing as murder, and it
was
murder in the eyes of