Murder Is Served by Frances Lockridge Read Free Book Online Page B

close about her, shivered in anticipation, and emerged from Charles’ into Sixth Avenue. She began to beat her way south and to know the familiar resentment against an unnatural phenomenon. On the east side of Sixth Avenue between Tenth Street and the south side of Eighth Street, the winter wind always blows against you. It does not matter which way you go, uptown or down, the wind is in your face. A northwest wind is in your face, a northeast wind takes your breath away, a wind from the south buffets you head-on although you are walking with it. It had, Pam thought resentfully, something to do with the old Jefferson Market Courthouse. Pam looked at the courthouse with animosity. She looked up at the clock on its tower. The clock informed her, smugly, that it was twenty minutes after ten. Pam had looked at the clock in Charles’ as she walked under it, coming out, and knew that it was actually about ten minutes after two. The wind blew dust in her face and her eyes watered. She put her head down, held on to the leopard-skin hat, and burrowed through.
    She passed two newsstands and, blurrily, saw big headlines on afternoon newspapers. She felt the instinctive alarm which large headlines inevitably arouse in city dwellers of the atomic age and, at Eighth Street, stopped, braced against the wind and bought a copy of the Sun . (Jerry could read Sokolsky when he got home, so discharging in a single burst, against a worthy object, all the pent-up animosity of the day.) The Sun’s headline said: “A. J. Mott Found Slain at Office Desk.” So, Pam thought, tucking the newspaper under her arm, that’s all. No atoms today. She fought on against the wind.
    When she reached the apartment, she tossed the newspaper on one of the beds and left it there while she put her face back on, while she told Martha to have steak for dinner, but to call up for it instead of going out, and while she said hello to Martini and the kittens, Gin and Sherry (which was gradually being translated into Chérie). Martini climbed on her lap and looked devotedly into her face, stroking her chin with a soft paw, and the kittens, excited by her return, dashed from the living-room into the bedroom. It was only when Pam heard them tearing paper that she remembered to wonder who had been killed in an eight-column line. She went into the bedroom. Sherry had burrowed under the newspaper and Gin was scratching her way through it toward her sister. Pam rescued the newspaper, dropped the kittens on the floor and read the headline again: “A. J. Mott Found Slain at Office Desk.” She ignored the banks of the headline and read the beginning of the story.
    â€œAnthony J. Mott, II, son of the president of the Greystone Bank and Trust Company, and himself widely known as a financier, was stabbed to death today as he sat at his desk in the office of André Maillaux, Inc., operators of the restaurant of that name at—East Fiftieth Street. Mott recently purchased a controlling interest in the restaurant company.
    â€œThe body was found shortly after noon by M. Maillaux, founder of the restaurant and one of its chief owners. He had gone to consult with his associate on routine matters.
    â€œM. Maillaux opened the door of Mott’s office and, as he did so, called a greeting to him, according to a receptionist in the office. But the greeting was stopped on his lips by the sight of Mott’s body. It was sprawled across the desk and bleeding had been profuse. The knife with which the financier had been killed was still in the wound, in the left side of the neck. According to the police, the weapon was one of the restaurant’s steak knives.
    â€œDeath had—”
    Pam North interrupted herself. She went out into the living-room and through it to the kitchen, carrying the newspaper in her hand.
    â€œOh, Martha,” Mrs. North said, “on second thought, I think we’d rather have fried chicken tonight; if you’d