How Like an Angel by Margaret Millar Read Free Book Online Page A

fact, all I knew was his name and the fact that he lived here in Chicote at one time.”
    â€œThen why are you here?”
    â€œThat’s a good question,” Quinn said, “I wish I could think of an equally good answer. The truth just isn’t plausible.”
    â€œThe listener is supposed to be the judge of plausibility. I’m listening.”
    Quinn did some fast thinking. He had already disobeyed Sister Blessing’s orders not to try and contact O’Gorman. To bring her name into it now would serve no purpose. And ten chances to one Mrs. O’Gorman wouldn’t believe a word of it anyway, since the Brothers and Sisters of the Tower of Heaven didn’t make for a very convincing story. There was one possible way out: if O’Gorman’s death had taken place under peculiar circumstances (and Quinn remembered the way Mrs. O’Gorman had hesitated over the word “gone”) she might want to talk about it. And if she did the talking, he wouldn’t have to.
    He said, “The fact is, I’m a detective, Mrs. O’Gorman.”
    Her reaction was quicker and more intense than he had anticipated. “So they’re going to start in all over again, are they? I get a year or two of peace, I reach the point where I can walk down the street without people staring at me, feeling sorry for me, whispering about me. Now things will be right back where they were in the first place, newspaper headlines, silly men asking silly questions. My husband died by accident, can’t they get that through their thick skulls? He was not murdered, he did not commit suicide, he did not run away to begin a new life with a new identity. He was a devout and devoted man and I will not have his memory tarnished any further. As for you, I suggest you stick to tagging parked cars and picking up kids with expired bicycle licenses. There’s a bicycle in the front yard you can start with, it hasn’t had a license for two years. Now get out of here and don’t come back.”
    Mrs. O’Gorman wasn’t a woman either to argue with or to try and charm. She was intelligent, forceful and embittered, and the combination was too much for Quinn. He left quickly and quietly.
    Driving back to Main Street, he attempted to convince him­self that his job was done except for the final step of reporting to Sister Blessing. O’Gorman had died by accident, his wife claimed. But what kind of accident? If the police had once suspected voluntary disappearance, it meant the body had never been found.
    â€œMy work is over,” he said aloud. “The whys and wheres and hows of O’Gorman’s death are none of my business. After five years the trail’s cold anyway. On to Reno.”
    Thinking of Reno didn’t help erase O’Gorman from his mind. Part of Quinn’s job at the club, often a large part, was to be on the alert for men and women wanted by the police in other states and countries. Photographs, descriptions and Wanted circulars arrived daily and were posted for the security officers to study. A great many arrests were made quietly and quickly without interfering with a single spin of the roulette wheels. Quinn had once been told that more people wanted by the police were picked up in Reno and Las Vegas than in any other places in the country. The two cities were magnets for bank robbers and embezzlers, conmen and gangsters, any crook with a bank roll and a double-or-nothing urge.
    Quinn parked his car in front of a cigar store and went in to buy a newspaper. The rack contained a variety, three from Los Angeles, two from San Francisco, a San Felice Daily Press, a Wall Street Journal, and a local weekly, The Chicote Beacon. Quinn bought a Beacon and turned to the editorial page. The paper was published on Eighth Avenue, and the publisher and editor was a man named John Harrison Ronda.
    Ronda’s office was a cubicle surrounded by six-foot walls, the bottom-half