Judge Me Not Read Online Free PDF Page A

displays of bedroom suites, by the deodorant and cosmetic ads that implored her to smell better, taste better, look juicier, acquire that wanted look—while behind Ronnie bounded the tireless beast which has a clock dial instead of a face, and carries the little packages of wrinkles, of gray hairs, of varicose veins, of sagging wattled tissues. In a nation where youth is a synonym of happiness, time-conscious women spend billions to cheat the hand of a clock, to prove that a calendar can lie. Teed went to sleep while playing the frayed old game entitled What Might Have Been. And Ronnie walked into his dreams, carrying a little wooden purse shaped exactly like a coffin, and one of the silver handles was actually a lipstick.
    At nine-thirty the next morning Teed turned into the drive of Lonnie Raval’s home on Roman Hill, in one of the most exclusive residential suburbs of Deron. The drive slanted up to an oval turn-around with a three-car garage beyond it, an antique lamppost on a patch of green in the middle of it.
    A small, stringy, dish-faced man wearing a white jacket came out the side door and stood waiting for Teed to approach.
    “I’d like to see Mr. Raval.”
    “Out in the back. What’s in the box?”
    “Cigars. I’m …”
    “I know who you are, Morrow, and where you work. He’s out in the back.”
    Teed walked around the garages. He glanced back. White-Jacket was following him at a careful thirty-foot interval. Lonnie Raval stood forty feet behind the garage.New golf balls were blazing white against the grass. Lonnie had an iron in his hand. He was a tanned man of medium height with strong shoulders. He was dark-haired, entirely unremarkable except for his eyes, which were long-lashed, liquid, melting black.
    He smiled at Teed. “Hi, fella! Glad to see you. O.K., Sam.” White-Jacket turned without a word and went back around the garage toward the house.
    “Trying to get more loft and more backspin,” Lonnie explained. He addressed a ball, swung hard. The ball went out in an arc that was too flat. A hundred yards down the manicured slope, a leggy brunette in a chartreuse sun suit scuffed over to the ball, picked it up and put it into the cloth bag she carried. There was something bored and petulant about her stance and her walk.
    “Now what the hell am I doing wrong, Morrow?”
    Teed moved over behind him. “Try it again, Mr. Raval.”
    “How many times I got to tell you to call me Lonnie, fella?” He prodded another ball out of the group, addressed it, swung. The result was the same.
    The girl picked it up. “I’m gettin’ tired, Lonnie,” she called, her voice coming thinly up the slope.
    “Just keep picking up the balls, you,” Lonnie shouted back. Teed saw her shrug.
    “Try placing the ball more off your right foot,” Teed said. “You’re trying to scoop them. Let the pitch of the club head do the work. Just imagine you’re going to hit a low flat one.”
    Lonnie tried another. It lofted high, came down and put on the brakes.
    “Hey, now!” Lonnie said.
    The next one worked the same way. And the next. “Fifteen bucks an hour I give that schnook at the club, and you do me more good in three minutes than he does in the whole hour.”
    “Lonnie!” the girl called.
    “Shut up!” he shouted. He slammed another one, putting more meat behind it. The girl stood where she was, and Teed saw at once that she had lost track of the ball.
    “Fore!” Teed yelled.
    The girl tried to break away, her hands going up. It was like slow motion. She ducked directly into the path of the ball, and he saw it rebound high from her dark head, heard the “tok” sound it made.
    The girl sat down, hard and flat, both hands flat on the top of her head. Lonnie started rolling on the grass, hugging his stomach and making strangled noises. “Funniest … Jesus … Oh, oh, oh,” he gasped.
    Teed hurried down the slope. The girl still sat there holding her head, her face all screwed up. Between sobs she