Murder is the Pay-Off Read Online Free PDF

quickly, took hold of the iron handle, pulled it down, and dropped it as if it had burned into her hand. The reels spun through the harshly colored, blurred cycle of cherries, lemons, oranges, plums, and bells, spun the full cycle and whirred in turn to a stop. A cherry, another cherry, and an orange. Then came the final click, sharp and still curiously hollow, and the jingle of the three quarters falling.
    “Leave ’em in, Janey! Leave ’em in for a nest egg!” someone shouted. “One more, Janey!”
    “Go on, Janey. One more. I know this machine.” It was Martha Ferguson who said that. She spoke quietly, but it sounded oddly like a command, as if thirty people there each willing the machine to pay must in some way make it pay. Janey Blake stood there motionless for a moment, her slight body rigid in front of the garishly painted machine, tensed sharply. She straightened her shoulders. Her towhead went up in a small gesture of defiance. Defiance, or was it pride? Connie Maynard, unconsciously gripping the back of her chair again, her own body as rigid as Janey’s, saw it as Janey’s hand went quickly out. She dropped the quarter, yanked down the arm, and flashed around.
    “There,” she said. “That’s that.” She took three steps forward, her eyes swimming blindly, her face white, her chin up. She took another step toward her table and had put her hand out to reach for it when the room broke into delighted tumultuous cheers.
    “Jack pot! Janey! Janey! It’s a jack pot, Janey!”
    Some of the quarters burst out over the cup, metal ringing on the tiled floor as everybody scrambled, laughing and excited, to pick up Janey’s jack pot out of the corners. One came rolling across the room, spinning crazily at last an inch from Connie Maynard’s green slipper. She put her foot out and stopped it without moving her eyes from Janey’s rigid figure by the table. Her hand was still out. She was balancing herself against the table, her face blank and white, blind and deaf.
    Deaf, blind, and very dumb, Connie Maynard thought sharply. She didn’t seem to realize she’d won the jack pot, or that it might have been for a thousand dollars the way Smithville’s elite were laughing and scrambling around on all fours picking up her rolling take. Jim Ferguson, president of the leading bank, and Martha his wife. Orvie Rogers, son of the richest man in the county. Doctor, lawyer, merchant, chief. To say nothing of Dorsey Syms, rising young banker, and his father Uncle Nelly. Or herself, for that matter, she thought, bending down and picking up the quarter at her feet.
    “Here,” she said. She thrust it into Jim Ferguson’s hand. “Give her this one, too.”
    He looked down at it, the banker’s caution so automatic that she laughed for the first time since Janey and Gus had come. “It rolled out, Jim. Right over at my feet. If it’s a counterfeit, some kind friend put it in.”
    He was already bursting back across the room to Janey.
    “Look, Janey! Here’s a gold quarter, somebody’s lucky piece! It’s a quarter with gold wash—it’s your lucky piece, Janey!” He opened her evening bag and thrust it inside, and dumped the rest of the quarters he’d picked up onto the pile on the table. “Come on, everybody. Bring out your folding money.”
    “What’s all this? What’s all this noise and racket?” Connie looked quickly over at the stairs. The screaming and laughter had brought her father down. John Maynard was bending over the banisters, handsome and smiling, as happy as everybody else. “What’s going on down here?”
    “It’s Janey, John.” Jim Ferguson pointed to the shining pile of coins heaped on the table. “Janey won the jack pot.”
    “Oh, good for Janey!”
    If he had won it himself John Maynard could not have been more pleased. He reached in his pocket for his billfold. “How much, Jim?”
    The president of the bank finished counting. “Thirty-two fifty, unless somebody’s holding out on