Nothing More than Murder Read Online Free PDF Page B

out on the edge of town, almost a hundred yards from the highway. It’s all that’s left of the old Barclay homestead, just the house and a couple acres of ground and the outbuildings.
    It was a little after midnight when I got there. I parked the car in the yard, in back of Elizabeth’s, locked it up, and went in the kitchen door. The coffee percolator was going, and there was some cheese and pickles and other stuff sitting out on the table. I went through the door to the dining-room and started up the stairs.
    “Oh, there you are, darling!” called Elizabeth.
    She was sitting in the living-room with a book in her lap, and the light turned low.
    “Wasn’t it nice of me to wait up for you?” she said. “I’ve even fixed a lunch. I know you must be famished.”
    She had on a little gingham house dress, and she was smiling, and for a minute I was crazy enough to think she wasn’t giving me a rib. Then I thought of all the times in the past she’d picked me up just to slap me down; and I went on upstairs without speaking.
    I washed, combed my hair, and went back down again.
    “All right,” I said, “spit it out. What’s up?”
    “Don’t you want something to eat, Joe?”
    “I’ve ate—eaten,” I said.
    “Did you ate—eat—with Carol?”
    “Pour it on me,” I said. “I’m used to it. Hell, how could I eat with Carol? I left the city this morning.”
    “I hope you weren’t foolish enough to register in together, Joe.”
    “No, we didn’t. I don’t know just when Carol registered. Just after the bus got there, I guess.”
    She sat staring at me, not speaking; her head thrown back, her eyes half closed. I told her about the bonehead she’d pulled on the price of the ad; and she only shook her head a little, as if nothing I could say would be of any importance.
    After a long time she said, kind of talking to herself, “No, it’s true. It is true.”
    “What’s true?”
    She held out her hand. “Let me see your date book, Joe.”
    I tossed it to her. It fell on the floor and she picked it up. She turned the pages to the month’s bookings.
    “I see Playgrand has been consulting you again,” she said. “I hope you received a suitable fee?”
    “Those are good shorts,” I said. “After all, we’ve got to buy from someone, don’t we?”
    “Now, what did we do at Utopian?” she said. “Did we give him a third of our feature bookings because he’s an old friend of ours? Or were we just a teeny-weeny bit—ah—intoxicated?”
    “All right,” I said. “I do give my friends the breaks. What’s the difference as long as it don’t lose us any money? You never saw me lose money helping a friend, did you?”
    “No, Joe, I never did. And you never lost any in striking back at any enemy. But tell me. What did they say to you at Superior? Didn’t they know you were the great Joe Wilmot—sole proprietor of his wife’s property?”
    “They didn’t say anything. That was all the dates I had open.”
    “Really?”
    “Yeah, rahlly,” I said. “And I wouldn’t push that wife’s-property business too far. All you had when I met you was a run-down store building and a couple of hundred seats that weren’t worth the chewing-gum that was stuck on them.”
    She shook her head, smiling that set, funny smile.
    “It’s weird, isn’t it? Positively fantastic.”
    “Goddamnit,” I said, “if there’s something there you don’t like, say so. We can change it easy enough.”
    “But I do like it, Joe! I like—I wasn’t criticizing. I was only evaluating. Weighing things, I suppose you’d say.”
    “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. “And that’s only half the story.”
    “Stupid,” she said. “Yes, actually stupid. That with everything else. Vain, vindictive, lying, dishonest, a philanderer. And stupid. And yet—”
    “You’ve left out a couple,” I said. “Repulsive and nauseating.”
    She nodded. “Yes, Joe. I left them out.”
    She seemed to be waiting