The Price of Murder Read Online Free PDF Page A

coming through the house, heard the clack of her clogs on the hardwood in the hallway, the softer sound of her steps on the rug. She came out onto the porch, saying, in a whining voice, “Honey, you just gotta do something about the car. When I stopped to let Ruthie off, it stalled and I …” She stopped as she saw Keefler. Lee saw her quick and expert appraisal of him, saw her arrive at the immediate conclusion that Keefler could be of no interest to her, saw her face change intothe look of hauteur and indifference she reserved for everybody she considered the least bit inferior.
    “Lucille, this is Mr. Keefler. He’s Danny’s parole officer.”
    And the look of indifference was gone, and Lee saw a curious alertness about her. “How do you do,” she said, very politely.
    “Hi, Lucille,” Keefler said, remaining stolidly in his chair. Lee had screened the porch a year and a half ago, and he had left the original railings. The screen was about eight inches beyond the railing. Lucille moved over and sat on the railing, long round legs straight, crossed at the ankles. She wore her dark blue swim suit, a short pale blue beach coat of thick terrycloth over it, and wooden clogs with white straps. Her hands were shoved deeply into the big pockets of the short beach coat, and the collar was turned up. Her hair was the coppery dark of old pennies, and coiled tightly, the coils no larger than coins, hair fitting her head closely with a look of spirit and bravery like a Roman youth. She was, Lee thought, almost unchanged by three years of marriage. Her perfect face had babyish blandness, large blue eyes set very wide, elfin snub of a nose, lips wide and heavy, teeth a bit too small and of a perfect white. She was now, as she had been three years before, one of the most provocative looking women he had ever seen. The life of her seemed so very close to the sensitive and unflawed satin of her skin. It was visibly warm in the pulse of her throat, in the lucent blue of veins at temple, wrist and ankle. Her long legs seemed to have extra curvatures, tender hollows, velvety paddings which, in other women, were but the hints of what here, in her, was almost too graphically expressed.
    She usually kept her hands out of sight. They were small hands, but thick through the palms, with very short fingers. The nails were deeply nibbled and ugly.
    Now she had her perfect summer tan, a honeyed luminescence that seemed more a glow of gold from beneath the skin than a deepening of color of the skin itself. The whites of her eyes were blued with her perfect health. There had been a little change. Her waist did not nip in above the sweet abundance of hips with quite such astartling contrast; there was a tiny roll of fat around her middle. There was a fullness under her chin, a small pad that unfortunately made it slightly apparent that there was not a great deal of chin in the first place. Her round high breasts were larger, the tissues less firm. And there were two tiny brackets of discontent around her mouth.
    He remembered a time last May when she had been at the school to meet him and had somehow missed him, and he had been hurrying to catch up with her when he spotted her a half block ahead, walking toward home, walking with her short quick steps, hips swinging in wine linen slacks. As he had come up behind two boys who were following her, keeping pace with her, he heard one of them say, with thick-throated fervor, “Damn! She’s really built for it.”
    That phrase had remained in his mind because it had been, in a curious way, an index of his self-betrayal. In the very beginning she had been the perfect delusion. Blinded by that magical face and body, he had read into her all the things he wanted to find. Her wide-eyed look was honesty. Her farm background and the office job in Battle Creek denoted energy and integrity. He detected an undertone of seeming cleverness in her most banal remark. Her automatic sexual hunger could not be