THE LADY KILLER: intense, suspenseful, gripping literary fiction Read Online Free PDF Page A

supplied her with a studio out back where she could live. It wasn’t much of a place, with corrugated walls and roof, a few windows, cold as hell in winter though she also had a wood burning stove in there, but the price was right so she moved.
    And she didn’t make bowls or plates all the time there either. They put her in the showroom behind the computer. Funny thing, sales picked up almost immediately upon her arrival, but it was no wonder if you’d seen her …
    “Really, was she that nice? You say a redhead?”
    “Yes, with brown eyes and a milk white complexion, a tiny compact figure and the most glowing smile you’d ever seen.”
    “So, she was pretty choice?”
    “No, not choice. She was easily the prettiest woman in Sausalito according to our consensus … oh, there were some others, but they didn’t rival her.”
    “And she picked out Hartwig?”
    Yes, sad to say. That is he picked her out. Then the more interested she seemed to become, the less did he. He still slept with her but he was attempting to part with her and move on. It was a touchy situation. These emotional involvements are. You don’t want to hurt someone but what can you do? You have no other choice so you move on. Feelings are irrevocable. Believe me there were any number of wolves out there waiting for her to give Hartwig the boot so they could take over but she was one of those modern oddballs, a faithful wench who wanted to get married and raise children and she had her heart set on ‘yours truly’.
    “It … it happens every time,” said Hammond. “Want something and the other doesn’t want it. Or at least it seems that way. Had Hartwig promised her anything?”
    “The usual, I believe. But the date’d long passed. The sound of wedding bells, which even Hartwig’s crotchety old mother’d approved of, for with all the people she disapproved of Gloria was one of those she did, had faded. Yet Gloria clung on. Even after their recent interruption and embarrassment which Hartwig managed to explain away to her as nothing.”
    “He could do that, of course, because she was still smitten enough to let herself be deceived.” I shrugged my shoulders.
    When we saw Hartwig the next day after that night, of course.
    “Thank you guys,” he’d told us, “that was really great of you. I didn’t know what I was missing.”
    What’d he mean exactly? You didn’t know. He liked to rub it in and he could be extremely exasperating at times. Then he disappeared for a week or so. No one’d seen him, and even Gloria came inquiring.
    “Have you guys seen Louis? He’s not at home. His car’s there and Stanley’s missing.”
    She wore one of her old fashioned suits she’d purchased at the flea market, with shoulder pads and a ruffled blouse. She looked extremely cute in it. The top was light brown almost the color of her eyes and her long reddish hair draped over it like molten gold poured out of a crucible. Or steel for that matter. Just something bright and shiny.
    With hang dog looks, we told her we hadn’t seen him, which was true, providing alternative suppositions to what might’ve happened to him, that, of course, were bogus. He’d gone to Sandy’s beach house with his dog. Believe me that was how fast this guy worked. When he moved in it was like a steamroller’d come down the street and flattened everything in its path. We didn’t find any of this out for certain until a week later although we’d expected as much.

Chapter Three
    But then what’d Sandy Hightower have to do in her life anyhow except hang out, go through the motions of trying to raise her recalcitrant son and both those pastimes are better undertaken with a companion. Preferably one of the opposite sex, personable and physically attractive if not wealthy, of good stock that could one day provide an inheritance; one who was willing to go to bat for you, which, of course, was Hartwig’s object for that’s how the con man works. He makes you feel better about