The Philadelphia Murder Story Read Online Free PDF Page A

cheeks again. She was looking past me at the door, and I turned quickly. Monk Whitney was there, looking down at the littered floor. If he was surprised, there was nothing in his manner to show it. He came on into the room.
    “It didn’t occur to you to check through the file before you gave it to him?” he said calmly. “Where’s the old Frazier efficiency they talk about, Coppertop?”
    She flared up passionately. “Quit calling me Coppertop! And I don’t need you to tell me what I should have done! I know it. I started to, but we were busy, and they were all before my time. I know it’s my fault. I’m not trying to pretend it isn’t!”
    “Myself, I don’t see what all the row’s about,” he said imperturbably. “If the old man’s got a dark streak in the past, I’m all for it. If it’s too dark, the Post isn’t going to publish it. They aren’t running a scandal sheet. Nobody’ll be hurt.”
    “You don’t know Myron Kane!” Laurel retorted hotly. “He’s so clever, they’ll never know what he’s doing. It’ll sound perfectly all right. I know. He told me in London last year he’d got even with lots of people that way.”
    Monk Whitney shook his head. “Who’s he got to get even with around here, Dear Child?”
    “Everybody. Sam and Elsie treated him like a police reporter with the smallpox. And he’s sensitive as a child; he’s always trying to cover up to keep from being hurt. Travis was horrid, and you’ve been just as bad. Patronizing and superior—”
    “I thought he was doing the superior patronizing, myself.” He grinned at her amiably. “And personally, I don’t give a damn about what he said to de Gaulle. And as for how close the bomb missed him in the viceroy’s swimming pool—”
    “That’s what I mean,” Laurel said. “You don’t care what happens to anybody but yourself. If you people had been halfway decent to him, we wouldn’t have had this sort of thing.”
    She bent down and picked up a handful of the discarded papers on the floor, thrust them into Monk Whitney’s hand and stood watching him as he read them aloud. The first paragraph Myron had written over half a dozen times. The version he’d got farthest along with said:
     
    Like most people who deal successfully with other people’s domestic and parental relations in problem form, Judge Whitney has been unsuccessful in his own, sometimes to the point of melodrama. He and his sister, who lives next door to him in Rittenhouse Square, have not spoken to each other for some eight years. His children have been a steady disappointment. His batting average on them was fattened, however, when the war gave his son Monk—short for Monckton—an outlet for energies admirably adapted to the South Pacific, but not to the staid moribundity of the Quaker City. His—
     
    Myron had crumpled up the sheet at that point. The next one was on the same general tack:
     
    While not obtrusive or vulgar about it, the judge is nevertheless aware of the eminent fitness of the fate that arranged for him to be born in Philadelphia and a Whitney. His daughter’s marriage to a man who as a boy carried his father’s lunch in a tin box to the coal mine was a breach, never entirely healed by the fact that his son-in-law can write a check for the judge’s gross earnings over a lifetime of serious legal and juristic effort without dipping into his current income enough to notice it. In the ordinary course of events in Philadelphia, Elsie Whitney might have been—and apparently was— expected to marry the socially acceptable son of a close friend of the family. The judge’s present secretary was the unwitting cause of the tragedy that put an end to that, as the young man took over his father’s financial obligations, and in so doing obligated the beautiful young secretary to the point that a movie finish is expected any—
     
    That was as far as Myron had got with that one. Monk Whitney stood looking down at it steadily for a