Murder is the Pay-Off by Leslie Ford Read Free Book Online

expect you home this early.” She stopped wiping her hands, the smile on her face fading. “Why, Janey, what’s the matter?” She put the dish towel down on the pantry table and came through the dining-room. “What is it, Janey?”
    For an instant the tenderness and anxiety in her mother’s face almost betrayed her. She turned quickly and took off her evening wrap. As she dropped it on the chair she saw her mother’s old gray coat on it, neatly folded across the back. Her black cotton gloves and worn black handbag were on the table. A thousand dollars— It was almost half of what her father made in a year at the Rogers plant— and with that and what her mother had made sewing and renting the spare room to a foreman in the shipping department they had brought Janey up and owned their own house, and even had a secondhand car now that Janey was married. They’d even saved something for their own kind of social security.
    “It’s nothing, Mother.”
    Her mother was still standing there looking at her.
    “Where’s Gus, Janey?”
    Janey put her hand on the chair to steady her knees.
    “He had to go out in the country.” She moistened her lips so she could speak. “Some man was killed. A man named Doc Wernitz—”
    “I know,” her mother said. “I heard it on the radio.” Her voice was brisk and matter-of-fact again. “He was a gambler. He ran all these machines—supposed to give you something for nothing and never do. The Smithville Recreation Company. If that’s what they call recreation. Janey!”
    Janey was staring at her, her eyes drained of color. The Smithville Recreation Company. The words were an inaudible whisper scarcely moving her lips. That was what was stamped in red on the back of many of the ten- and twenty-dollar checks she’d written to the Sailing Club that the bank had returned with her statements the first of the month. Pay to the Smithville Recreation Company. It was stamped in red letters on the back—of a few hundred dollars’ worth of all the checks she’d written.
    “Janey, what is the matter with you?” her mother demanded. “Everybody knew Mr. Wernitz was the Smithville Recreation Company.”
    Everybody but Janey. It went slowly through her mind. I didn’t know.
    “And now they’ve murdered him.” It was a statement of simple fact, the event neither surprising nor regrettable, the way her mother said it. Then, as if she had not meant it to sound as callous as it did, she said, “But it’s a pity all the same. I’m sorry for the poor man. He wasn’t a bad sort, just by himself. Dad’ll miss him dropping by the plant on hot nights, to visit out on the pier.”
    Janey swayed dizzily. Her mother’s voice seemed a long way off, reaching her through a swarm of angry bees buzzing in red stamped letters around her. It seemed as if her mother was saying her father knew Doc Wernitz, and Doc Wernitz used to visit with him. But it couldn’t be. She was too dazed to hear.
    “In fact, he was a lonely sort of man, your father always said.” Her mother went over to the chair and took her coat. “His people came from the same place in the old country Dad’s came from. I guess Dad’ll miss him, if nobody else does. I guess your father was the only friend he had. Real friend, I mean.”
    She put on her coat. Janey stood motionless. The swarming bees had gone away. Everything seemed curiously quiet and very clear. Doc Wernitz was the Smithville Recreation Company. He was the one who cashed checks for the Country Club and the Sailing Club when the banks were closed and they’d run out of silver. He was a friend of her father’s. He hadn’t banked all of her checks he’d taken. That explained why so few of them showed on her monthly statement from the bank. The cold fear caught again at her heart. What did it mean? Had he just kept them, because her father was his friend?
    She went uncertainly through the doors into the cool shadows of the dining-room and let herself down into