Curtain for a Jester by Frances Lockridge Read Free Book Online Page A

This was almost automatic; in the foyer of Mr. Byron Wilmot’s apartment, things often jumped at you. There was a strong possibility, this morning, that Mr. Wilmot might have a few tricks left over from the party, and would play them on her. But nothing jumped at her, nothing made alarming sounds at her, nothing slithered on the foyer floor. She took off her coat and hung it in the closet, made sure that her notebook was in her purse, unconsciously straightened her soft, brown hair. Then she went into the living room.
    Just inside she stopped, as if she had walked into a wall. She put both slim hands up in front of her, as if to protect herself from the wall. And she thought, No! This is too much. This is utterly too much.
    This time, presumably for her benefit, Mr. Wilmot had really gone to town. This time he had spared no effort, done anything for a laugh.
    Mr. Wilmot, in a dressing gown and pajamas, lay on his back on the green-tiled floor. He lay there neatly, his arms by his sides, the dark blue of his robe smooth over his rolling abdomen.
    For some distance around the recumbent Mr. Wilmot, there was a shallow, dark expanse of what anyone—not knowing Mr. Wilmot—would have taken for blood. Sticking upright from Mr. Wilmot’s chest was the haft of what anyone who did not know the Wilmot habits would have taken for a knife, its blade embedded. Versimilitude was complete; one could have sworn that Mr. Wilmot lay there murdered.
    Having given the effect the tribute of a convulsive halt, Martha Evitts now gave it the further acknowledgement of a gasp of horror. (After all, much trouble had been gone to. Antagonistic as she felt toward Mr. Wilmot, she could not entirely let him down.) Momentarily, she waited for Mr. Wilmot to rise, to laugh, to tell her that he sure had fooled her that time.
    When he did not rise (to take his bow), Martha decided that more was expected. A scream—at least a moderate scream—was indicated. Martha drew in breath to scream.
    And with the breath she drew there came a kind of muskiness—something not quite a recognizable odor—something that made the nerves at the back of her neck tighten, as if she were a furred creature and the fur were lifting.
    She did not scream. Her face drained white, her hands trembling before her face, she backed from the dead man—from the sweet muskiness of blood—from murder on a green-tiled floor.
    For seconds she stood so, her hands shutting away the sight of Mr. Wilmot with a knife in his chest; her mind sickly accepting what her eyes had seen. She felt nausea beginning, and backed farther toward the foyer.
    Then she not so much saw as became aware of in her nerves some movement in the room. She made herself take down her hands, and look beyond the body, across the room. She saw him then, for an instant.
    John Baker was not in the room. He was on the terrace outside; she saw him, for that fraction of a second, through the glass of the french doors. She saw his face. He looked at her, across the dead man. Then, as if he had not seen her, he was gone.
    She saw him so briefly, his movement from her vision was so flickeringly quick, that it was almost possible for her to think she had not seen him—that the shock of what she had seen, and now still saw, had somehow so jangled her perceptions as to wreck their reliability. But she could not really think this. John Baker had been on the terrace, looking into the room—looking at her without seeming to see her, at what was on the floor, at—
    She stood, shuddering, and waited. A thought hammered at her mind. At the man he had killed? At the man—
    She would not let the thought into her mind. John would not kill a man. (But last night he had been hard, bitter, not like himself.) John had come to the apartment before her (for what reason?) and had found what she had found. Something (but what? What? ) had taken him to the terrace. He had looked in, but it was darker in