The Silencers Read Online Free PDF Page B

slightly rumpled woman standing in the center of the room.
    “Now, Gail,” I said gently, “you’d better give me what your sister gave you, and you’d better tell me what she told you, word for word.”

6
    After a moment, she laughed. Then, deliberately, she turned away from me and walked across the room to the dresser, studying her reflection in the mirror. She pulled up her long white kid gloves, grimaced at a smudged palm and tried to rub it clean. She smoothed down and brushed off her dress. The gleaming blue stuff was brocade, I noticed. My grandmother upholstered her sofa with it, but nowadays they wear it.
    “May I have my purse, please?” she asked.
    “No.”
    She glanced at me sharply, and swung back to face me, settling the fur jacket about her shoulders.
    “My dear man, let’s stop this foolishness. You haven’t really got a gun in your pocket, have you?”
    It was my first opportunity to study her at leisure at close range in good light. She was a very attractive woman, slender and graceful, slightly above average height, but, unlike her sister, not conspicuously so. I’ve been calling her pretty, but there was more than prettiness in her face. She had very large, clear gray-blue eyes, skillfully accentuated by make-up. She had a slim, aristocratic nose. She had fine cheekbones, with that faint, delicately haggard hollowness below that the girls all try for...
    I mean, she was almost perfect, but the mouth gave her away. Not that it wasn’t fundamentally a generous and well-shaped mouth, even if the lipstick had suffered some recent damage. It was a mouth with good potentials, but you could tell she’d never taken advantage of it. She’d never had to. She’d undoubtedly got by on her looks since she was a baby, and now, at thirty give or take a year or two, her mouth had the betraying, calculating, spoiled and selfish expression characteristic of the professional beauty.
    There was the mouth to give her away, and there was the business of my alleged weapon. She hadn’t had the guts to call my bluff at the bridge, as her sister would have done. This wasn’t a woman who’d ever charge the muzzle of a loaded revolver, for any cause. No, she’d waited until it was perfectly safe to act brave and scornful.
    I took the pen out of my side pocket, showed it to her without comment and clipped it to my inside pocket where it belonged. I got her purse out and looked inside it. Her various identity cards couldn’t seem to agree on her last name, but I gathered she’d been born Gail Springer and lived in Midland, Texas. I remembered that the name Mary Jane Springer had figured in Pat LeBaron’s report. I tucked the little wallet back into the purse and looked up.
    “If you’re looking for something respectable to call me,” she said, “Mrs. Hendricks will do. He was the last, and I guess I’m still entitled to use his name.”
    “The last?” I said.
    “The last for the time being, anyway,” she said. “Before that, I was Countess von Bohm for a little while, and then there was that polo player from Argentina, and before that there was a cowboy named Hank, my only true love. I ran away with him when I was seventeen, and he broke his neck in a rodeo a month later.”
    “Tough,” I said.
    She moved her shoulders beneath the furs. “So? He only had one neck, and Daddy would have broken it for him, anyway, when he caught up with us. Or, we’d have got on each others’ nerves or something. This way I can remember how it was, bright and beautiful and unspoiled.”
    She said it all with a perfectly straight face, but she was kidding somebody in a bitter sort of way, me, herself, or a boy named Hank who’d died to give her a pleasant memory.
    I asked, “How’s Sam on horseback?”
    “Sam?” She laughed. “What makes you think that phony can ride, those forty-dollar boots?”
    “That’s about the way I had him figured,” I said. “What’s his full name?”
    “Sam Gunther.” She drew a