Murderers' Row Read Online Free PDF Page A

course. She was supposed to be. That was what I was there for. The idea had been for her to look spectacularly beat-up—to show how seriously we took her disloyalty—without having anything really broken except a certain bone in the forearm. As Mac had said, she had to have at least one broken bone or they wouldn’t buy it. Besides, a nice big cast makes a person look very harmless and helpless, while at the same time it affords concealment for a number of small emergency tools and weapons, properly designed. The surgeon at the local hospital had his instructions...
    But I hadn’t got that far when she keeled over; and a woman doesn’t die from a bruised eye or a cut lip. She doesn’t die from a split dress seam or a laddered stocking. I’d been following instructions carefully. Except for the incidental damage to her clothes and necklace, nothing was broken, and she’d lost no significant amounts of blood. She was just dead, lying there.
    I rose and went over and sniffed the glass she’d set aside. It smelled of whisky and nothing else. I uncapped the bottle she’d used and tasted the contents cautiously. If there was an adulterant, it had the flavor of whisky, or no flavor at all. Of course, she could have been given something slow-acting in a drink before she came in here, or in her food, if she’d eaten. Or she could have been shot with a poisoned dart, or stuck with a hypo, or bitten by a black widow spider. Or she could simply have died of heart failure.
    I grimaced. Matt Helm, boy detective. It didn’t matter what she’d died of, for the moment: she was dead. Scratch Jean, agent, female, five feet four, a hundred and thirty pounds. I went to the door and paused to check my watch band for telltale fibers, and my pockets and pants cuffs for beads. I kicked a slim black shoe out of the way, reflecting absently that I’d never yet met a woman, pro or amateur, who could stay in her pumps when the going got rough.
    I looked back. If you can do it, you can damn well look at it, no matter how badly you’ve loused it up. I never trust these delicate chaps who are hell behind a telescopic sight at five hundred yards but can’t bear to come up close and see the blood. I gave her a long look, lying there among her spilled pearls. What did I think about—besides wondering, again, what the hell went wrong? Well, if you must know, I thought it would be nice to be in Texas, which is a hell of an attitude, for a good New Mexican.
    I went out, pulled the door closed behind me, removed my gloves and put them in my pocket. I turned and walked casually towards my parked car. As I did so, I realized there were people at the pool.
    We’d counted on the pool being empty after dark, this time of year. I’d gone too far to turn back without attracting attention; so I sauntered by in a leisurely way, and even allowed myself to glance in that direction, like any man curious about what kind of fools would want to go swimming this late on a cool fall night. An athletic male was doing a racing crawl down the pool. On shore there was another man and two girls. These three were making a funny, funny thing of how cold the air was, how cold the water was, and how cold they were.
    Maybe I shouldn’t have looked at all, though it seemed like the natural thing to do. Maybe I just looked too long. Anyway, the smaller of the two girls glanced around and, seeing me, gestured for me to stop. I couldn’t very well pretend I hadn’t noticed. I stopped, like any man flagged down by a pretty girl. I waited. She came up to the low fence that separated the tiled pool area from the concrete walk.
    â€œM-mister, have you g-got a m-m-match?”
    The cigarette between her blue-cold lips bobbed as she spoke. She had good reason to be cold; she didn’t have enough on to warm a newborn kitten. Personally, I applaud the return of the reasonably discreet one-piece bathing suit,