Murder a la Richelieu (American Queens of Crime Book 2) Read Online Free PDF Page B

you want me to do?” I asked stiffly.
    She shook her head. “You wouldn’t.”
    “Come, come,” I said gruffly. “Out with it.”
    She looked back over her shoulder, and I was surprised to see how haggard she had grown since she moved into the hotel the year before. She couldn’t have been twenty-five and she had looked younger than that then. Now she had dark arcs under her eyes and a pinched look about her mouth.
    “Would you lend me ten dollars?” she whispered.
    I regarded her over my spectacles. “To throw away, as you’ve thrown the rest away, betting with the bookies.”
    “You know everything, don’t you?” she asked sullenly.
    “When a woman guest in this hotel keeps the porter busy running down the street to the bookmakers, everybody knows it, sooner or later.”
    “I guess so,” she murmured drearily.
    “Look here,” I said, “a place like this is the worst spot on earth for a young married couple.”
    “You’re telling me,” she said, her lips trembling.
    “You don’t have enough to do; no wonder you get into mischief. And if you ask me, your husband wouldn’t drink so much if he had anything else with which to occupy himself. Why don’t you two rent a little house and make a fresh start?”
    In her shallow blue eyes there was a sudden radiance. “If we only could!”
    “Forget wild oats,” I said bluntly, “and raise flowers and chickens – and babies for a change. You used to be in love with each other, I dare say.”
    “Yes! Oh yes!”
    “Well, then you’d probably be again with half a chance.”
    “A chance! But that’s all I ask, just a chance!” she cried.
    I shrugged my shoulders, and she caught my arm, clung to me pleadingly.
    “That’s why I’ve got to have ten dollars! It’s-it’s my chance.”
    “I suppose someone’s given you a tip on some broken-down race horse that can’t lose.”
    “Neilson isn’t broken down. He’s sure to win, and the odds are twenty to one. Please, please, Miss Adams, if you knew! If you only realized! Two hundred dollars means the difference between heaven and hell to me.”
    “No fool like an old fool,” I muttered and with a sniff took two five-dollar bills out of my purse.
    “It’s the seventh race at Latonia,” she cried. “And God bless you!” She was gone, dancing down the hall with my ten dollars.
    “That’s the last I’ll see of her,” I told myself grimly, it having been my experience that the quickest way to be rid of people is to lend them money.
    I was feeling cross. It had been a nagging day. A number of things had upset me. Before I started for Grace’s room on the second floor I went over and jerked the shades down. The sun streams in my south windows half the afternoon. They look out toward the employees’ entry at the rear of the hotel. Middleway between is a rusty fire escape which no one ever used except the insurance inspector once a year.
    Although the entrance is from the corridor, I can reach the iron railing of the fire escape from the back window in my bedroom. As I started to pull down the shades I remembered I had hung an intimate piece of my wearing apparel on the railing to dry that morning.
    Guests are discouraged from doing laundry work in their rooms, but I doubt if there was a woman in the house who did not wash out handkerchiefs and underthings. I did, and do, whenever I felt so inclined.
    I had leaned out to recover my garment, which was skittishly flaunting itself in the breeze to the satyrish amusement of two pimplish youths in the building across the court, when I saw the waitress Annie come out the rear door of the hotel, walk swiftly along the paved alleyway, and set off down the side street. I stared after her, feeling a catch in my heart. She was such a forlorn young thing. I wondered why waitresses never have any family and backing.
    Not that I am familiar with a number of the profession; only the girls I had met in the Coffee Shop all were rather pathetically on their own, so