The Dishonest Murderer Read Online Free PDF

something.
    â€œYou’re worried, Freddie,” Celia said. “You’re worried too.”
    It was a statement, yet it demanded answer. The girl’s eyes demanded honesty.
    â€œYes,” Freddie said. There was nothing to add to it.
    They could not stand there, so near the door from the foyer, so detached from the others. Freddie put an arm around Celia’s shoulders, drew her toward the party. Everyone seemed very contented, very full of conversation. Voices were lifted a little, to be heard over other lifted voices. Uncle William’s aide had found a pretty girl, and was looking beyond her toward Breese Burnley. Breese had found champagne. She had also, Freddie noticed, found Howard Phipps. She was talking to him and, so far as Freddie could tell, from a little distance, listening to what Phipps said in return. They must be talking about Breese, Freddie thought, and made a tiny mewing sound at herself for thinking it. Miaow, Freddie thought, without uttering the sound.
    â€œBruce!” she thought then, smiling at people, walking toward her father with her almost full glass held carefully. She thought the name with a kind of explosive force, as if she could make Bruce hear by thinking his name hard. “Bruce! Where are you?” Almost, she found, she listened for an answer.
    Her father was talking to Uncle William, rank appropriately meeting rank, and she heard the words “damned Reds” and then Vice Admiral Satterbee interrupted himself and turned away from William Fensley. (Who was, after all, only a rear admiral, even if not yet “ret.”)
    â€œHaven’t seen Kirkhill,” Admiral Satterbee told his daughter. The accusation in his voice was, she was sure, only a token of concern. Her face must show her anxiety, then.
    â€œStood me up,” she said, keeping it light. “May I toast the year with you, Dad?”
    Her father said, “Wumph.” He sounded angry.
    â€œNo excuse,” he told her. “No excuse I can see. Where is he?”
    â€œPlease, Dad,” Freddie said. “He’s tied up somewhere.”
    â€œNo business being,” her father said. “Supposed to be here, isn’t he?” He drew his brows down. “Unless—” he said, and stopped, thinking better of it. He looked at his daughter’s face.
    â€œSorry, Freddie,” he said. “Don’t worry.”
    â€œIt’s all right, Dad,” she said.
    â€œYou’d have heard,” he said, meaning, clearly enough, that she would have heard if something had happened to Bruce. It didn’t follow, she thought; it was not sufficiently consoling. But she managed to smile and nod. Then she remembered.
    â€œYou started to say something,” she told her father. “You said ‘unless,’ and stopped. And you were—” She had started to go on, to ask whether he had been talking about Bruce on the telephone to a man whose voice she had never heard, which was not a voice, in texture, in rhythm, like those of the people in the room. But this was not the time for that. Watkins was standing by a window, looking at his watch, ready to open the window, to let, as it would seem, the New Year in, to let the roar of the city carry it in.
    â€œNothing,” her father said. “If—perhaps later, Winifred. It’s almost time.”
    He took out his watch to prove it. He showed her the watch. Its faint tick was a rattle in the throat of the dying year. What a thing to think! What a way to think!
    Then the roar started. The whistles started, the bells, the indescribable sound, underlying all identifiable sounds, which was the sound of people. Someone shouted on the street below; someone, farther away, fixed a gun—an automatic, she thought—rapidly. In the room there was a kind of quiver in the air, a sudden stirring.
    Her father, facing her, was raising his glass and she raised hers, to touch it. The tiny sound of