Death Trap by John D. MacDonald Read Free Book Online Page B

other on Thursday.”
    “What does she think about all this?”
    Vicky frowned. “It’s hard to say really. There were only the two girls. Naturally the Paulsons took it very badly. They’ve been preaching hate to her. I heard that it took them a long time to bring her around. She couldn’t believe it. I still don’t think that way down in her heart she has managed to believe it. I saw her once on the street. She looked away. But before she looked away there was a funny little expression of—appeal. Maybe an appeal for understanding. I guess she doesn’t have the courage to fight the whole world.”
    “Your investigator,” I said to Tennant, “couldn’t find any other boy friends?”
    “None. Nancy is a very steady girl, very reliable. He came up with a lot of stuff about the kid sister. I couldn’t use it. I wouldn’t get any sympathy for my client by maligning the dead.”
    “What kind of stuff?”
    “To be very frank, Mr. MacReedy—”
    “Hugh.”
    “All right. Hugh. My name is John. To be frank with you, the young Paulson girl at age sixteen was sexually precocious. She was in her first year of high school. There’d been trouble about her in junior high. Apparently she had started very early. She wasn’t as pretty as Nancy. She was considerably more—earthy in appearance. I can remember an excerpt from a report. One of the high school boys was willing to talk, provided his name was kept secret. I can’t remember the exact words, but it goes something like this. ‘Jane Ann Paulson would take on anybody. It was like she just didn’t give a damn. When we had dances sometimes four or five guys would take her out in the parking lot, one at a time. Everybody knew what was going on. Some of the college guys were getting it too. She was too young to go in the bars, and they’d pick her up in Dockerty’s Drugstore. It was hushed up now, but one time she was gone for three days during the Easter vacation and police were looking for her and everything, but it turned out she was at the Alpha Delt House up on the hill with a couple of fellows who hadn’t gone home for the vacation. I guess she couldn’t have been over thirteen, but she looked anyway eighteen ever since she was just past twelve. She’s built big, up here. The two college fellows were expelled and I guess Jane Ann’s old man just about beat her tail off, but you couldn’t change her. Not her. All they could have done was send her away to one of those schools, but the Paulsons wouldn’t do that. I guess they thought it would look bad. I guess they didn’t know just about everybody in the whole town knew all about Jane Ann.’”
    “I remember the scandal at the school,” Vicky said. “It was hushed up fast, the way those things are.”
    “She doesn’t sound like the sort of kid that gets raped,” I said. “It doesn’t sound as though rape would be necessary.”
    “That would have been my only justification for bringing all that information up,” Tennant said. “But it couldn’t do enough good to outweigh the harm. By then the papers had made her out to be a sweet, simple, virginal child.”
    “And for some reason that is the way the town seems to remember her,” Vicky said. “All the rest is forgotten.”
    I thought for a moment and said, “Would that kind of background give anybody a motive to kill her? Suppose it was a married man. Maybe she was pregnant.”
    “Not according to the autopsy.”
    “How about blackmail?”
    “Not very likely.”
    At that moment the two paint-smeared kids came up, and the boy said, “It’s all done except where we can’t reach so high.”
    “Okay, workers of the world. You two go clean your brushes under the hose faucet. I’ll be along to finish. Pour your paint back in the big can I was using.”
    The kids hurried off. “If you both think he’s innocent, there has to be a starting place. I want to help. Where’s the right place? Should I talk to Alister?”
    “I can arrange it.