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

a chair, holding tightly to the edge of the table to keep from missing the chair and falling to the floor. Had he told her father? What if some of her checks, the ones he had not taken to the bank, were out at his house? What if Gus found them? What if Connie Maynard, out there now with Gus, found them? As she closed her eyes she could feel herself thinking, If only I didn’t have to open them again, and ever look at anyone again—
    “Janey.” Her mother had started to the front door, but she came back into the dining-room. Her shadow in front of the lamp on the hall table threw a merciful darkness across the table where Janey sat.
    “Yes, Mother.” How could she sit there in the crumbled ruins of her small universe and say, “Yes, Mother,” as if nothing had happened and nothing mattered?
    “I don’t know what’s the matter, Janey, but I know you don’t act like yourself anymore, so it must mean you and Gus are having trouble. It’s what Dad and I were afraid was going to happen when you were so bent and determined on marrying him. There was nothing anybody could say to you, you were so crazy in love with him. Dad wanted you to marry Orvie Rogers, because Orvie is a good boy, even if he didn’t want you at first to run around with Orvie’s crowd instead of boys of your own kind and condition. And Dad never thought Gus would marry you, Janey. The way you were, blind and deaf and dumb to everything else, Dad and I were worried sick all the time. You were so crazy mad after him. And if Constance Maynard hadn’t gone off and left him the way she did, there’s no telling what would have happened. She was the one he was in love with. Everybody in town knew that. He was never any part as crazy about you as you were about him.”
    “I know it.” She tried to speak it, but no sound came. She knew it very well. It was that other reality she faced and tried desperately to forget each time she yanked down the handle of the slot machine. It was the thing she knew each time Gus said, “Why don’t you get Orvie to take you?” It was the answer, every time she cried out to herself in protest that it was not Orvie but Gus she was married to.
    She moistened her lips again. “I know it, Mother. You don’t have to remind me.”
    “Somebody’s got to remind you. I’m not doing it just to hurt you. You’ve got little Jane to think of, Janey. I’m glad to come and sit here when you and Gus want to go out and Dad’s at work. I like to do it. But not if it makes you forget Gus has his work and you have yours. And that’s most likely what’s the matter with you right now, with that Maynard girl working on the paper and all. I guess you’re worried, worried sick, Janey. But Gus is your husband. I don’t think he’s apt to forget as easy as you think. Gus never looked to Dad and me like a man that lets anybody pull him around by the nose.”
    She patted Janey’s shoulder. “What if I worried all my life because there were a lot of pretty girls working the same place Dad worked? Good night, Janey. You better go and see that little Jane hasn’t kicked the covers off. It’s cold tonight.”
    The front door closed behind her. Janey listened to her step on the frosty pavement until it was gone and the house was silent except for the hum of the oil burner in the basement and the icebox motor coming on and going off.
    “You’ve never thrown away a thousand dollars,” she whispered. “You’ve never wished you could go to bed and go to sleep and never have to wake again—”
    She pushed her chair back from the table and got to her feet. The black evening bag was on the table in the hall. Her feet were like blocks of frozen wood as she went over to it and picked it up. She held it for a moment and opened it. There were the thirty-two dollars in bills on top, that Constance Maynard had stuffed in there, with her handkerchief, and some quarters that dropped on the table as she took the bills out. One of them was the