Til Death Read Online Free PDF Page B

but Angela did not open the door for him. He heard her footsteps retreating and then the bedsprings creaking as she hurled herself down. He eased thedoor open and entered the room. Angela was lying full length on the bed, her face buried in the pillow. She wore a full white slip and her brown hair tumbled to her shoulders in a riot of disarray. Her slip had pulled back to reveal a blue garter taut around her nylon.
    “Pull down your dress,” Carella said. “Your behind is showing.”
    “It’s not a dress,” Angela said poutingly. “It’s a slip. And who asked you to look?” but she pulled it down over her leg instantly.
    Carella sat on the edge of the bed. “What’s the trouble?”
    “There’s no trouble.” She paused. “There’s no trouble at all.” And then she sat up suddenly, turning her brown eyes toward her brother, surprisingly Oriental eyes in a high-cheekboned face, the face a refinement of Carella’s, pretty with an exotic tint that spoke of Arabian visits to the island of Sicily in the far distant past. “I don’t want to marry him,” she said. She paused. “That’s the trouble.”
    “Why not?”
    “I don’t love him.”
    “Oh, bullshit,” Carella said.
    “I don’t like swearing, Steve. You know that. I never could stand swearing, even when we were kids. You used to swear on purpose, just to annoy me. That, and calling me ‘Slip.’”
    “You started the ‘slip’ business,” Carella said.
    “I did not,” Angela told him. “You did. Because you were mean and rotten.”
    “I was telling you the truth,” Carella said.
    “It’s not nice to tell a thirteen-year-old girl that she’s not really a girl because she still wears cotton slips.”
    “I was helping you on the road to maturity. You asked Mama to buy you some nylon slips after that, didn’t you?”
    “Yes, and she refused.”
    “It was in the right direction.”
    “You gave me an inferiority complex.”
    “I gave you an insight into the mysterious ways of womanhood.”
    “Oh, bullshit,” Angela said, and Carella laughed aloud. “It’s not funny. I’m not going to marry him. I don’t like anything about him. He’s a worse boor than you are. And he swears more. And besides…” She stopped. “Stevie, I’m afraid. Stevie, I don’t know what to do. I’m terrified.”
    “Come on,” he said, “come on,” and he took his sister into his arms and stroked her hair and said, “There’s nothing to be afraid of.”
    “Steve, he’s killed people, do you know that?”
    “So have I.”
    “I know, but…we’re going to be alone tonight in…in one of the biggest hotels in the world…right in this city…and I don’t even know the man I’m about to marry. How can I allow him to…to…”
    “Did you talk to Mama, Slip?”
    “Yes, I talked to Mama.”
    “And what did she say?”
    “She said, ‘To love is to fear nothing.’ I’m translating loosely from the Italian.”
    “She’s right.”
    “I know, but…I’m not sure I love him.”
    “I felt the same way on my wedding day.”
    “You didn’t have all this church hullabaloo.”
    “I know. But there was a reception. It was just as nerve-wracking.”
    “Steve…do you remember one night…I was sixteen, I think. You’d only been a cop a short time. Do you remember? I’d just come home from a date, and I was sitting in this room having some milk before I went to sleep. You must have had thefour-to-midnight shift because it was pretty late at night, and you were just coming in. You stopped in here and had milk with me. Do you remember?”
    “Yes. I remember.”
    “Old Birnbaum’s light was burning across the way. We could see it through the window there.”
    He looked across at the window and through it over the long expanse of his father’s back yard to the gabled house belonging to Joseph Birnbaum, his father’s closest friend and neighbor for forty years. He could remember that spring night clearly, the sound of insects in the back yard,