Murder Misread Read Online Free PDF

salt shaker and the dolmas plate, bounced across the
table, and landed on the floor running. She was pulling open the
door before Charlie could turn his astounded head.
    But then he heard it too,
still partly masked by the bouzouki music but getting louder. A
woman screaming: “Help! Oh, my God, help! Help!”

3
    Anne Chandler’s wandering
attention was caught by her own stubby fingers pulling yet another
Gauloise from the pack. Unwillingly her eyes slid to the ashtray:
this would be number seven. No, eight, damn it. She tapped the
cigarette back into the pack regretfully and tucked it into her
jacket pocket.
    “ So, uh,
do you suppose you could give me the extension?” asked the pimply
student sitting stiffly on the other side of her desk. His Adam’s
apple bobbled in his scrawny young throat. Knot, the French called
it: noeud de la gorge, knot of the throat. And noeud de la
question, the crux of the matter. The crux
was that this poor kid wasn’t suited for college at all. Anne
wanted to pat his downy cheek, set him on a tractor, let him earn a
living in the healthy open air with no need to decipher any more
funny-looking French words.
    But no doubt he was
pursuing some other, less suitable goal. Ambitious parents,
perhaps. It would be kindest to get it over with. Anne squashed her
maternal instinct and said briskly, “Three more days. But that’s
it, Bill. I can see that it’s a problem for you to get the paper in
by next Wednesday”—somewhere in his maundering account he had made
some excuse or other, she remembered vaguely—“but I really have to
close the books on this course. It’s already a week past the
final.” She stood up to signal the end of the
conversation.
    “ Yeah, okay, I’ll try,
Professor Chandler.” He stumbled to his feet glumly.
    “ I’ll look forward to
getting your paper,” she lied with her best inspiring-teacher
smile. His gangly height loomed a good twelve inches over her own
stocky bantam figure. “See you later, Bill.”
    “ Thanks, Professor
Chandler.” He shifted his bookbag apologetically and ambled
out.
    Anne fingered the
cigarettes and looked at her phone.
    It didn’t ring.
    What the hell was he up
to?
    With sudden decision she
plopped back into her chair, picked up the receiver, and dialed Ken
Little.
    “ Ken, sorry to call you so
late, but I can’t meet you for lunch today. Could we
reschedule?”
    “ Sure thing, Annie. I have
some kind of bug anyway, woke up feeling woozy, and I wasn’t really
looking forward to lunch that much. You know, with the food at the
Union—”
    “ We really should get the
film schedule set soon, though,” she broke in, paging through her
calendar. “How about tomorrow, at ten?”
    “ No good.
Eleven?”
    “ Fine, I’ll start my
office hours late.”
    “ Okay. Do you know if
there are any bugs going around? I mean, this just came out of the
blue. When I woke up—”
    “ You’ll feel better
tomorrow, Ken. See you then.” She pressed down the cradle before he
could reply and, without letting herself think, dialed Tal’s
office. But again it rang fruitlessly, over and over.
    Dr. Lambert,
then.
    God, why was it so
difficult? She had muscled her way brashly into the academic world
long before women were welcomed. La plastronneuse , some catty old
professor had nicknamed her: the pushy one, the show-off. Or, more
literally, the starched shirtfront, the breastplate, the chesty
one. Tal had been delighted with the pun, burrowing his nose into
her ample bosom and murmuring lasciviously, “Mmm, la plastronneuse !” and
they’d both giggled like kids. Well, pushy she’d been, she’d had to
be. She had defended countless papers at conventions, had traveled
alone in France and French Africa, had force-fed the glories of
French literature to generations of linguistically lazy students.
But now, instead of making a simple call, her fingers were again
twitching at the Gauloises.
    She pulled her erring hand
from her pocket, placed