The Price of Murder Read Online Free PDF

anything but love.
    He could not believe that a face and body of such perfections could contain a third-class mind. He told himself that her environment had not given her a chance to grow. When he talked she looked at him with shining eyes and rapt attention that could only come from a superior intelligence and from a sensitivity that had never been given a chance to develop. He would develop it. He would take delight in her growth.
    He had been stubborn, and it had taken a year before he could see her clearly and know how poor had been the bargain he had struck. As the first child and only daughter of the Detterichs she had been grievously spoiled. She had been that rarity—a beautiful baby, a beautiful child, a beautiful adolescent. In a world where beauty was so highly prized, it was only necessary to be looked at and admired. She had learned that she was a great prize, andthat it was inevitable that she would be given all the good things of the world. By someone. Her parents gave all they could. She was never given chores. She never made her own bed, or cleaned her room. In school she had been an indifferent scholar, a bland dreamer without intellectual resource. In her dreams she was a famous actress, or singer, or movie star. But never was there any effort to implement these dreams.
    Even the job, he learned, had been a phony. She had dropped out of high school in the middle of her junior year, and for the next two years had done absolutely nothing, rising at noon, washing her hair, lounging around the farmhouse, waiting only for dusk and the inevitable car in the drive, the peremptory honk, the long evening date. Boredom had finally driven her to Battle Creek. After a six weeks’ course at a business school, during which she had learned very little, she had gone to work for her uncle, her mother’s brother, a general agent. Lee remembered the way Uncle Rog had said, “Seel dressed up the office pretty good.” And chuckled. “Hard to keep the boys out working on prospects. Used to be if you wanted to lose anything for good, have Seel file it.”
    The last illusion to go was the one of love. Unlike the norm of most beautiful women, she was strongly, hungrily sexed. But her only interest was her own gratification. He existed as an available instrument of her completion, not as a person. She would say the expected words of love, but as a short lesson learned by rote.
    He knew that, as a person, he did not exist for her. Nor did anyone else in the world really exist. She lived entirely for herself, and anyone who entered her life in any way existed only as a part of the frame around her. Should they fit her preconceived notion of herself, they were acceptable. If they did not fit, they were ignored.
    She was an indifferent housekeeper, a dull, lazy and unimaginative cook. In his final knowledge he admitted to himself that she was stupid, lazy, insensitive, greedy, superficial and curiously coarse. He had thought a child might change her, but after he became convinced they could not conceive, he felt a guilty relief. He took the joyless use of her that she took of him. And he intonedthe expected words with her own lack of conviction. He felt responsibility toward her. He did not feel that he could leave her. And when he thought of how she would be in twenty years, soft, fat, querulous, whining, his heart seemed to hang sick and heavy in his breast. He knew she would hurt him in his profession. At the moment it was not too important. At faculty affairs she was decorative, and when she opened her mouth and the emptinesses came out, it was thought cute. Lucille, the doll-wife.
    The one factor he most resented was the way she managed to stifle his ability to do a second novel. He tried. He could not work. There was always the knowledge of her in the house. Her listless boredom, her sighing discontent. She felt he had cheated her somehow. This life was too meager. She didn’t understand money, or how to handle it. She