1965 - The Way the Cookie Crumbles by James Hadley Chase Read Free Book Online Page A

plot from some movie, and at first, she decided without telling him, that he was crazy: a freak with a hole in his head, but as he talked on and on, she began to see that such a plan might work and if it did, the money was there.
    ‘He’s never seen his daughter,’ Edris concluded. ‘He’s heard nothing of her for sixteen years. There is a family resemblance. I can see it. You look uncommonly like Muriel. He’ll see it too. From that angle, there is nothing to worry about. He’ll accept you as his daughter without question. You can see that, can’t you?’
    Yes, she could see it. She knew from what her mother had said that she did look like Muriel when Muriel was her age.
    ‘But what about the daughter? The one I am to impersonate?’ she asked. ‘What about her? Suppose she hears about me?’
    ‘She won’t,’ Edris said and rubbed his hands together. ‘She’s dead. She died last week. That’s why I’m here. If she was alive, we couldn’t do it. It was only when Muriel told me she was dead that I dreamed up this idea.’ He looked searchingly at her face to see if she accepted these lies. ‘Even now we can’t do anything until Muriel dies. But that won’t be long . . . three or four months.’
    Ira moved uneasily.
    ‘How did the daughter die?’
    ‘She was swimming, got cramped and drowned,’ Edris lied glibly.
    ‘Can’t something be done about Muriel?’
    ‘No. She’s as good as dead now.’
    Ira sat silent, staring through the windshield of the car.
    ‘Well?’ Edris asked impatiently. ‘Will you do it? There’s little risk.’
    ‘I’ll think about it. It wants a lot of thinking about. Be here this time next Sunday and I’ll tell you one way or the other.’
    ‘I can’t come up from Paradise City again, baby,’ Edris said. ‘This is part of my yearly vacation. I have to earn a living.’ He took a card from his wallet. ‘Here’s my address. Send me a telegram when you have thought it over. Keep it short: yes or no. There’s no great hurry. We can’t do anything until Muriel dies. Plenty of time to get things right, baby, and they certainly have to be right.’
    She thought of this first meeting with Edris as she walked through the reception lobby of the airport and made her way to the bus terminal. She had seen him twice since then. He had put a lot of polish on his plan during the four months’ wait. She couldn’t see now how it could go wrong. She had taken leave of her father, telling him she had a job outside New York and wouldn’t be coming back.
    He was too drunk to care. Her one regret was leaving Jess Farr. She didn’t tell him what she was going to do. He would have asked too many questions. She told herself there must be many better and more exciting men to be had when you owned fifty thousand dollars. She told herself that, but she didn’t believe it. She discovered to her irritation that she was more in love with Jess than she realized. She would miss him.
    Watched by male eyes, she moved out of the shadows of the airport, crossed into a patch of early morning sun and got aboard the bus for Seacombe.
     

CHAPTER THREE
     
    T his isn’t the road to Paradise City!’
    They had been driving in silence for some thirty minutes. Now, Algir had suddenly slowed down and swung the Buick off the highway and along a narrow dirt road bordered on either side by citrus shrubs.
    ‘This is all right,’ he said curtly, and slightly increased the speed of the car.
    ‘But it isn’t!’ There was a shrill note of alarm in Norena’s voice. ‘I know this road it leads to the sea! You’ve made a mistake, Mr. Tebbel.’
    ‘What’s the matter with the sea?’ Algir asked, staring in front of him. He couldn’t bring himself to look at the girl. ‘Don’t you like the sea?’
    The previous week he had driven along highway 4A, searching for an isolated place where he could kill this girl and get rid of her body. This road they were on now led to the place he had found. He had come