Hunter and the Trap by Howard Fast Read Free Book Online Page B

night at the Carlyle. At about eight or so, I guess.”
    â€œDid you know he would make a run for it?”
    â€œHe told me.”
    â€œDid you try to stop him?”
    â€œAndy?”
    â€œAll right, but why did he stay in the city? Why didn’t he break clear?”
    I shook my head.
    â€œWho are the next of kin, Monte?”
    â€œOne wife is dead. Another lives in Paris. The third lives in San Francisco and hates his guts.”
    â€œHow about that Spanish dame and the little creep with the black polish hair?”
    â€œThey worked for him.”
    â€œWell, someone has to come over to the precinct with me,” O’Brian said, “and sign papers and then go to the morgue and make arrangements.”
    â€œI’ll do that.”
    â€œFuneral arrangements?”
    â€œI’ll start the ball rolling. I’ll do what I can.”
    â€œMy God,” O’Brian said, “Andy Bell had enough friends. We certainly won’t have any trouble in that department.”

16
    We didn’t. Andy had been part Episcopalian, and the Rector of St. John the Divine suggested that the services be held there. Over three thousand people turned up, and the front part of the Cathedral contained about five percent of the best names in Who’s Who, not to mention the Blue Book. Liz and I patched things up, and I dutifully put out two hundred and twenty-five dollars for the black ensemble she wore. She looked very attractive. I suppose a hundred people mentioned to me how attractive Liz looked. Diva and Jose were not there. They took off the same day Andy died, and no one ever saw them again or heard of them again, and the talk around was that they had robbed Andy of every nickel he had. But the truth of it was that every nickel he had was on him when he died, and his estate was deeply in debt, even though the royalties would pay off the debts in due time and show a handsome income eventually.
    Andy’s third wife’s father had established a family plot in an Episcopalian cemetery out in the Hamptons. Strangely, with all that great crowd at the cathedral, only a handful drove to the cemetery: his third wife, her mother, myself and some cameramen. It was a pleasant day, and the cemetery was on a high, pretty, windy knoll. Liz was going to go out with me, but at the last moment she developed a migraine headache and had to go to bed.

The Trap

Chapter One

    Bath, England
October 12, 1945
    M RS . J EAN A RBALAID
W ASHINGTON , D. C.
    My dear Sister:
    I admit to lethargy and perhaps to a degree of indifference—although it is not indifference in your terms, not in the sense of ceasing to care. I care for you very much and think about you a good deal. After all, we have only each other, and apart from the two of us, our branch of the Feltons has ceased to exist. So in my failure to reply to three separate letters, there was no more than a sort of inadequacy. I had nothing to say because there was nothing that I wanted to say.
    You knew where I was, and I asked Sister Dorcas to write you a postcard or something to the effect that I had mended physically even if my brain was nothing to shout about. I have been rather depressed for the past two months—the doctors here call it melancholia, with their British propensity for Victorian nomenclature—but they tell me that I am now on the mend in that department as well. Apparently, the overt sign of increasing mental health is an interest in things. My writing to you, for example, and also the walks I have taken around the city. Bath is a fascinating town, and I am rather pleased that the rest home they sent me to is located here.
    They were terribly short of hospitals with all the bombing and with the casualties sent back here after the Normandy landing, but they have a great talent for making do. Here they took several of the great houses of the Beau Nash period and turned them into rest homes—and managed to make things very