The Man Who Shot Lewis Vance Read Online Free PDF Page B

sanity and the room I possessed, I had found it easier simply to give in and read her manuscript, not knowing that it would continue to grow. It now was more than fifteen hundred pages long. The prospect of including family photographs filled me with delight.
    Something, I could see, was in her hands, a rather large wicker sewing box. She held it out to me and I advanced to take it. It was surprisingly heavy.
    “Photographs,” I said.
    “Photographs,” she replied. “Going back to 1800.”
    “That’s before photography was invented,” I informed her.
    She looked at me from the shadows as if my ignorance had no bounds.
    “You look through the photographs and counsel me on which would be most illustrative of what you have already edited,” she explained. “We can discuss it tomorrow. Each, you will find, is clearly marked on the reverse. Some are copies Harold made from glass plates, tintypes, and the like.”
    I almost asked who Harold was but even three beers did not drive me to such foolishness. Actually, I considered the price of looking at the photographs a cheap one to pay for escaping from a nocturnal confrontation with Mrs. Plaut.
    “I’ll do that,” I said, turning to enter the house.
    “I’m thinking of purchasing a device to aid the hearing,” she said behind me, and I was alive with new hope.
    “Terrific idea,” I said, turning to her and speaking as loudly and distinctly as I could.
    “I’d like to be able to hear my canary Sweet Alice,” she explained. “And Mr. Peelers, though you may not have noticed it, there has been a slight inclination on my part not to hear everything with perfect clarity. After all, I am—”
    And I waited for the disclosure of Mrs. Plaut’s age, a fact that had remained secret to all boarders in the Heliotrope house for perhaps a century, according to legend.
    “—in my middle years and must recognize that all bodily functions deteriorate, not unlike in a Ford automobile,” she concluded.
    “I would like the doctor with whom you work to make some recommendation about the proper inconspicuous device to assist my hearing,” she went on, “if it should at some point need assistance.”
    I shifted the wicker basket of photographs in my arms and said loudly, “I share office space with a dentist. Shelly is a dentist, Mrs. Plaut, and I don’t think—”
    “Doctors get discounts,” she explained. “I am interested in an Aurex, which the ads say is like glasses.”
    I would puzzle out later how a hearing aid was like glasses but now I simply wanted to get my burden to my room and sleep off a long day of work, a murder, and too many beers with the Ringo Kid.
    “I’ll do it,” I agreed, and was relieved to see a smile of satisfaction on her face. I turned and entered the house as the squeak of the porch swing resumed. Somehow I was going to have to go through the box of photographs and come up with a price on the hearing aid for Mrs. Plaut, I climbed the stairs, considered knocking on Gunther Wherthman’s door, decided it was too late, and went as quietly into my room as I could.
    I took off my rumpled seersucker suit, hung it in the closet, changed my underwear, brushed my teeth in the washroom down the hall, and returned to my room and small table to eat a bowl of Wheaties and milk while I looked at a few treasures from the Plaut photo collection. My room isn’t much but I like it that way. Not much to have. Not much to lose. I liked the idea of knowing that if I didn’t have to return some night I wouldn’t miss anything except Gunther and the Beech-Nut clock on the wall, which told me it was now a little after one in the morning. I had a small refrigerator, a hot plate, a wooden table with two wooden chairs, and a sofa with doilies on the arms that I was forbidden to remove under pain of torture by Mrs. Plaut. I had a bed but I had moved my mattress to the floor because of my bad back. Mrs. Plaut had learned to tolerate this eccentricity, though I’m