Murder for the Bride Read Online Free PDF Page A

shadow.”
    “No, Sam,” I said.
    His big chest lifted as he sighed. “What good can you do? I talked to Paris. He’s through with you. He doesn’t want you around. This is his business, not yours.”
    “It’s my business, Sam.”
    He pulled his thumb, cracking the knuckle. “Boy, listen. A year ago Dumont asks me who can maybe come along and fill this chair. I tell him you. He says I’m crazy. I tell him you’re steadying down. Mean anything?”
    “Later it might, Sam. I don’t know. Right now it doesn’t mean a thing. Thanks, though.”
    “You gotta be heroic, eh? Go plunging around and make like catching murderers. A movie boy. Amateur cop. Maybe Dumont was right, boy.”
    “Think about it, Sam. Use your head. Put yourself where I’m standing.”
    He closed his eyes. He looked like an old white toad, sunning himself. “Engineers!” he said softly. “Better I should be house mother to a sorority. Twenty years ago I could take you out in the hall and beat it out of you.”
    “Never,” I said. “Not with fists. Not with a club.”
    He opened his eyes. “How are you fixed?”
    “Money? I’ve been banking my pay for five years. Twenty thousand or so I’ve got. And then Laura’s dough. She banked it here the day she arrived. She had cash and bearer bonds she converted to cash. I get that, I guess. Around a quarter of a million. I don’t know what taxes will do to it.”
    He whistled with surprise. “And I was going to give you a bonus to keep you going until you get all this nonsense out of your system. Maybe you won’t ever want to go back to work.”
    “I’m one of those suckers who work for more than the dough involved. I work because it’s something I can do and like to do.”
    “Let me know when you’re ready to come back,” he said.
    I stood up. “How did you find me?”
    “Jill phoned. She said they’d found you in the Quarter and bedded you down in a room at the Bayton. She’d feel better if you left town. So would I. So would Paris.”
    “They’re calling Laura things,” I said. “I know she wasn’t like that. Part of staying is proving she wasn’t.”
    “Get out of my office,” he said wearily.
    I went to the apartment. The third-floor hallway was empty. The key slid easily into the lock. Eleven in the morning. The door clicked shut behind me. I had the crazy impulse to call her name. I just said it with my lips, without sound.
    I couldn’t feel much of anything. I had expected to feel a lot. I went to the closet. Her clothes hung there, with the scent of her on them. I crushed the fabrics in my hands.I picked up the left shoe from a pair I didn’t remember. The shoe was new, but the sole was peeled open, the heel broken loose. All her shoes were like that. Somebody had looked hard for something. I wondered if he had found it. I wondered what it was.
    The bureau drawers had been pretty well messed up. I guessed that they had been dumped out and the police had later put the things back in. The papers I had read over black coffee that morning told how the body had been discovered at three in the morning, an estimated three hours after she died. One of those accidents. The man on the floor below had come home a little stoned. He had gone up two flights instead of one and had walked into what he thought was his own apartment. Except for that accident, I might have walked in on her.
    I sat on the edge of the bed and smoked. Funny there was so little reaction. After a time I went into the bathroom. Her yellow toothbrush was in the holder. That did it. The storm didn’t last long. After it was over I felt different. Cold and quiet, almost nerveless. I knew that I could go on. Anguish was carefully locked away in a deep and private place. After this was all over maybe I could take it out again. Maybe it would still be fresh and sharp. But I had no more time for it now. Anger and pain had changed to a new emotion. There was enough money, and all the rest of time. The world