1958 - Not Safe to be Free by James Hadley Chase Read Free Book Online Page A

decided she wasn’t so attractive and was wondering how he could get rid of her when I arrived.”
    “Well, I’ll be damned!” Delaney said, his voice suddenly harsh. “I’ll kick his tail for him! Where is he?”
    “Floyd, please . . . I promised him I wouldn’t tell you. You mustn’t say anything to him, but I thought you should know about it.”
    Delaney moved over to his drink, picked up the glass and finished the martini.
    “There’s not much point in knowing if I can’t do anything about it,” he said impatiently. “I don’t object to him fooling around with a girl. At his age, that’s natural, but I’m damned if I’ll stand for him bringing some tart up here.”
    “He won’t do it again, Floyd. We had an understanding about that,” Sophia said quietly.
    Delaney ran his fingers through his hair.
    “Well, then. . .”
    He glanced at his watch. His mind was already beginning to move away from the subject of his son, which never interested him for more than three or four minutes at a stretch. He had a lot to do this night. The Hollywood call bothered him. He had made an offer for the new Atlantic Book of the Month choice and he had just learned that M.G.M. were also interested in the book. If his agent, Brennon, didn’t hurry up, the book might cost him more than it was worth.
    “Floyd . . . Jay is a little odd, isn’t he?” Sophia said. “Ever since I’ve known him I’ve thought he was—well, a little odd.”
    Delaney looked sharply at her.
    “Odd? I wouldn’t say that. Perhaps he’s a bit too quiet for his age and maybe he doesn’t mix enough, but I wouldn’t say he was odd. What exactly do you mean?”
    What exactly did she mean? Sophia wondered. She really had nothing to go on except this instinctive feeling the boy wasn’t entirely normal.
    “It’s a feeling I have.” She hesitated, then went on. “Sometimes I think he’s a little sinister. Why does he always wear those dark glasses? It’s as if he is hiding away his real thoughts from everyone. There’s an atmosphere about him. . .”
    Delaney was suddenly bored with all this. His mind was too absorbed in his own affairs to be bothered with abstract impressions.
    “For heaven’s sake! Jay, sinister? You’re imagining things. There’s nothing sinister about the boy . . . nothing at all.”
    Again Sophia hesitated, then, compelled to go further because of her genuine alarm, she said quietly, “His mother was a little queer, wasn’t she, Floyd?”
    Delaney’s face hardened.
    A little queer was an understatement.
    Harriette would have been certified as insane had she not thrown herself out of a tenth-floor window of a hotel in Los Angeles. Although it was now twelve years since that fatal day, the thought of it still made Delaney flinch. His mind shied away from the memory of the years he had spent with Harriette. Admittedly the first year had been enchanting. She had been breathtakingly beautiful, vivacious, wealthy and exciting. But from the very first, she had been eccentric, but amusingly so. To anyone with any insight the hint of mental instability was there but Delaney had no insight.
    Her fits of crying, her outbursts of violent temper and her sudden hysterical elation made her to him interesting and unpredictable. Her passion for dangerously fast driving, her long periods of sulky brooding and her restlessness were things that Delaney shrugged off as part of her personality.
    Jay was born a year after the marriage and Harriette gave the boy over to a nurse, taking no interest in him. As the years went by, she developed such an active dislike for him that Delaney sent him to boarding school and during the vacations arranged that Jay didn’t come home.
    Harriette’s mental condition slowly deteriorated. Although Delaney’s friends had long realized that she was mentally sick, Delaney himself, absorbed in his work, was still unaware that there was anything seriously wrong with her. His married life was no longer