Death Claims Read Online Free PDF Page A

hung gaudy next to the front door. Below it was a bell push. He thumbed it and inside chimes played four notes of a tune he hadn't heard since World War II. A gospel tune, "Love Lifted Me.'' He remembered a bleak barracks and the lonesome wheeze of a dollar harmonica. Then suddenly everybody singing. Everybody but him. He hadn't known the words. But he'd learned them. There was no way not to. Also obscene variations. He grinned to himself and a bony, freckled girl in a starchy green shirtmaker dress opened the door. No makeup. Frizzy red hair yanked back and knotted. Pencil stuck in the knot. Horn-rim glasses. In a forties movie she'd have turned out lovely in the last reel. 
    "Yes?" she said crisply. "May I help you?" 
    "I'd like to see Mr. Wade Cochran." 
    Her smile was weary. "So would several million other people. How did you find this place?" 
    "It took some telephoning. About an hour's worth. By me and a team of secretaries in my office. Screen Actors' Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, two agents, a business manager, a television studio, a recording studio, three police departments, sheriffs' offices in two counties, the state highway patrol, the bureau of records in Sacramento, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Cattle Breeders Association and I'm sure I've left out a few. I think I deserve to be rewarded for sheer persistence." 
    She wasn't amused. "Have you a card?" 
    He gave her a card and she read it and said, "But you telephoned. I told you he couldn't see you." 
    "Your error," Dave said. "You should have told me he was out." 
    "Mr. Cochran doesn't permit us to lie." She half shut the door, then opened it again, said, "Will you wait, please?" and closed it. Tight. 
    He crouched beside the setter, whose muzzle lay between her long front paws on the green boards. He scratched her ears again and she shut her eyes and rumbled contentment. His look strayed to the empty hills. Not empty. A lone horseman rode the ridge at a walk. High above him a red-tailed hawk drifted on a lazy wind, sun haloing its wings. Behind Dave the door opened and the red-haired girl's voice said: 
    "Come in, please." 
    The set decorator had been here. The room was 1880. Pinks and bachelor buttons in the wallpaper. Furniture machine-carved walnut and oak glowingly refinished, upholstered in tufted black leather. Coal-oil lamps on marble-top tables with red ball-fringe throws. The girl led him across a floor of gleaming pine planks and braided oval rugs. Briskly. So he only glimpsed by the fieldstone fireplace at the room's end a white-haired woman in dark glasses, seated in a wheelchair. Gaunt, big-boned, leathery. Mrs. Pioneer. A man with a mane of straw-color hair and a face like a new plow blade bent toward her from a platform rocker, talking. Mr. Evangelist. 
    The red-haired girl opened double doors with narrow panels of fernleaf-patterned frosted glass. And it was the last half of the twentieth century again. A big swimming pool glittered blue in a flagged patio walled in by ells of the house. A swimmer angled toward the bottom of the pool. Dave's heart jarred. A man lay down there on his face, a clothed man, inert, limbs stirred by the motion of the water. The swimmer reached him, slid an arm under his chin, pushed backward and up, kicking for the surface, following the bubbles of his spent breath. He broke the surface, gulped air, shook back blond hair and, still gripping the throat of the limp man in the crook of a muscular arm, half turned and with his free hand stroked for the pool edge. 
    When he reached it he grimaced, struggling to lift the unconscious weight. Dave ran to help him, crouched, gripped the body under the soggy arms and heaved upward. He staggered backward and nearly fell. Because it wasn't heavy. It had almost no weight at all. For seconds he stood there stupidly clutching it while its wetness soaked into his clothes. It wore a plaid flannel shirt and Levi's and cowboy boots,