1972 - Just a Matter of Time by James Hadley Chase Read Free Book Online Page B

was prepared to describe it in detail for a $10 bill. Gerald had arrived at the hotel, dirty, shabby and bearded just as Mrs. Morely-Johnson was going out for her morning shopping. As the result of smoking a reefer to bolster his courage, Gerald was in an ugly and truculent mood.
    He had confronted his aunt in the hotel lobby and told her in a loud voice what he expected of her. The old lady listened to this dirty-looking boy, scarcely able to believe her ears. She was aware that her so-called friends were also listening and staring.
    She felt helpless and she looked at the doorman who hadn’t seen Gerald’s entrance, waving her hands in a signal of distress. The doorman, remembering many past favours, grabbed hold of Gerald and ejected him from the hotel with considerable violence but not before Gerald had yelled, ‘Okay, you stupid old cow . . . if you don’t want me, then up yours!’
    It had been a scene that took Mrs. Morely-Johnson some time to live down. Had she not been worth five million dollars, the manager of this luxury hotel would have asked her to leave.
    According to the dossier, Gerald had then gone to Los Angeles. He had joined up with a Hippy group and had spent the next three years living rough, scratching up some kind of living until he finally opted to become a drug pusher. This enterprise lasted less than two months before the Vice squad caught up with him. His father now dead, he had only Mrs. Morely-Johnson to turn to. A detective called on her and asked her if she was prepared to do anything for her nephew. The detective happened to be a handsome Negro. Mrs. Morely-Johnson had been born and raised in Georgia and couldn’t bear the sight of a black skin. Apart from loathing her nephew who had practically wrecked her way of living at the Plaza Beach Hotel, talking to a black detective was, to her, the uttermost end. She dismissed him with a wave of her hand.
    Gerald spent two years behind bars. During that time he brooded and finally came to the conclusion that he had been badly treated from childhood, that the world owed him a living and Mrs. Morely-Johnson should be made to pay. This was, of course, a deduction offered by Marks’s investigator and Bromhead was prepared to go along with it. In Gerald’s place, he would have felt the same way. When he was released, Gerald had gone to New York and to the Hippy scene, but he left drugs alone. He knew he was now a marked man and if the police had reason to arrest him again, he would go away for a long time.
    It was during this time when he was living in a vacuum that he met Veda Rayson. She was young, pretty and willing, and what was more important, she had a comfortable income from her father who was thankful not to have her living in his house.
    Gerald and she teamed up and she let him live with her in her two-room apartment, paid the bills and generally made his life comfortable. The four months he lived with her turned Gerald soft. He came to like this way of life. He hadn’t to get out of bed before eleven o’clock in the morning. He had his meals provided. When he needed clothes, he had only to ask. Also, Veda happened to be the most exciting lay he had had so far. So what could you want better, man? he asked himself.
    Then one morning as Gerald, waking, was turning Veda on her back, she gave a tiny, suppressed scream that frightened him. Then followed the commotion of telephoning, getting an ambulance, having her dragged down the spiral staircase in a hammock by two boozy-faced ambulance men with Gerald, shaking and panic in his heart, following them and offering useless advice.
    At the hospital the nurse had told him there was no hope. Marks’s investigator hadn’t wasted time going into details but it seemed Veda had been fighting cancer for the past year. The investigator had picked up gossip from the hospital receptionist.
    The nurse who had broken the news to Gerald had been Sheila Oldhill, and the receptionist said that this woman