Root of His Evil Read Online Free PDF Page A

same. I knew I had to get out of there, or something was going to happen that I was not in the least prepared for in my own mind, and that I did not want to happen. I loosened his arms and sat up, and began to shake my hair as though to straighten it out. “Do you have a comb?”
    He got up and went in the bedroom. I grabbed my hat, the envelopes with the money in them, and my handbag, and scooted. I didn’t wait for the elevator. As soon as I was in the hall I dived for the stairs, and ran down them, four or five flights. When I reached the lobby I ran out of the hotel, jumped in a taxi and told the driver, “Straight ahead, quick.”
    He started up, and I was so busy looking back to see if anyone was following, and straightening myself up, that I didn’t notice how far we had gone. When we got to Fiftieth Street I told him to turn west, because I had to go to the bank before I went home. But it was a one-way street going east, and I paid him and got out to walk the one block to Seventh Avenue. I got to the corner, turned it, and started for the night deposit box. As I did so, somebody grabbed my arm from behind.
    I jumped, shook loose and dived for the deposit box. I flipped the envelopes in, spun the cylinder, and turned around. If it was a bandit, I was going to scream. If it was Mr. Holden, I didn’t know what I was going to do. It wasn’t a bandit, and it wasn’t Mr. Holden. It was Grant standing there and looking very sheepish. “I had an idea that money would be deposited.”
    “My, you frightened me.”
    “Feel like a walk?”
    “It’s terribly late.”
    “It’s two o’clock—about the only time you can walk in this God-awful town. But that isn’t the real reason.”
    “And what is the real reason?”
    “You.”
    “Why didn’t you say so?”

Three
    W E BEGAN TO WALK over toward the East River, but I wasn’t any too friendly because while I was really glad he was there, I couldn’t forget the way he had let me be dragged off from the hall without doing anything about it. So he began asking questions about the union, which I answered as well as I could. It was rather hard to explain it to him, however, as he apparently thought there had been a lot of preliminary phases, as he called them, all occurring in some extremely complicated way, although all that had happened was that some of the girls had become dissatisfied with conditions, and when they found out about the big op deal that had been made, had themselves gone to the union for help. Then the word was passed around, and one thing led to another, and it all happened very quickly with hardly any of the elaborate preliminaries that he seemed to think were involved. He kept asking me if I had read this or that book on the labor movement, but I hadn’t, and didn’t even know what he was talking about. So he died away pretty soon, and then he said: “I guess that about covers it. It’s what I’ve been trying to find out.”
    “Then I’m very glad to be of help, if that’s what you wanted because if it was really me you were interested in you took a strange way to show it.”
    “Well—here I am.”
    “Rather late, don’t you think?”
    “I told you. I like it this time of night.”
    “Between this time of night and that time of night three very fateful hours have elapsed. A lot can happen in that time.”
    “Happen? How?”
    “There are other men in the world besides yourself.”
    “They don’t start anything at Lindy’s.”
    “I haven’t been to Lindy’s.”
    “You—?”
    “Some people are more enterprising than you.”
    He stopped, jerked me by the arm and spun me around. “Where have you been?”
    “Never mind.”
    “I asked you where you’ve been.”
    “With a gentleman at his hotel, if you have to know.”
    “So.”
    We went along, he about a half step in front of me, his head hunched down in his shoulders. Then he whirled around in front of me. “And what did happen?”
    “None of your business.”
    We had