Nice Weekend for a Murder by Max Allan Collins Read Free Book Online Page A

panties, she said, “If I hadn’t come along on this trip, you’d be cozying up to that little flirt, wouldn’t you?”
    “Don’t be silly.”
    “Was that a gun in your pocket, or were you just glad to see her?”
    “Hey, there wasn’t
anything
in my pocket!”
    I got out of my clothes. Turned out the lights. Sat back down on the bed.
    “You have no right to be jealous,” I said. “You’re the one who’s leaving
me
, after all.”
    “I have to. My job in Port City is finished.”
    “A girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do.”
    “I have to work, Mal.”
    “There are other jobs. You could find something in Port City, or anyway the surrounding area.”
    “And you could pack up and come with me. You’re a writer—you can work anywhere. Nothing’s keeping you in Port City.”
    We’d had this conversation dozens of times, in minorly varying forms. My next remark would be that I had property in Port City—not only my house, but the farmland my parents had left me, which I had to keep an eye on, and... well, anyway, that’s what I would normally say next. And she had something to say that came after that, but to hell with it. An impasse is an impasse.
    “We weren’t going to talk about this,” I said, “this trip.”
    “I know.”
    “So how did we get onto it?”
    Her voice was a little sad as she said, “I guess I can’t stand the thought of, after I leave, you taking up with some little chippy the minute I’m out of the city limits.”
    “Chippy?” I said, savoring the word. “Chippy? I was thinking more of finding some floozie. Or perhaps a hussy. Or maybe a bimbo; yeah, that’s the ticket. I think I’ll find me a bimbo to take your place, the minute you leave town.”
    “Very funny,” she said, and there was enough moonlight filtering in through the window for me to see that she was indeed smiling a little.
    “What do you want to do about these twin beds?” I asked.
    “Push them together,” she said.
    “Good idea.”
    I moved the nightstand out of the way, and we mated twin beds, and then we just plain mated.
    “We should have made a fire,” she said, snuggling with me in my twin bed.
    “What do you call what we just did?”
    “You know what I mean. It’d be very romantic, the fireplace going in this otherwise dark room.”
    “ ‘Otherwise dark room,’ huh? Pretty fancy talk. You must hang around with a writer or something.”
    She snuggled closer. “An author,” she said.
    “We’ll have our fire tomorrow night. Forecast says it’s going to get colder and maybe snow some, over the weekend.”
    “An author who talks like a TV weatherman,” Jill amended, then sat up in bed and stretched; the moonlight made her body look smooth, bathed it in ivory.
    “I’m going to take a shower,” she said, yawning.
    “Do you want to get dressed and take in Pete’s movie, after?”
    “I don’t think so. I’ve seen
Laura
a million times. Anyway, I’m bushed. You can go if you like, though.”
    “You’d trust me?”
    “For the next couple hours or so. Your powers of recuperation being what they are.”
    “You couldn’t have trusted me that long when I was twenty-five.”
    “Well, Mal, you’re thirty-five, like the rest of us, and I’ll trust you till midnight.”
    She slid out of bed and padded barefoot into the bathroom and the sound of the shower’s spray soon began lulling me. I lay there trying to decide whether I wanted to get out of bed and get dressed and take in that flick. I was fairly keyed up, despite the long day. But the sheets felt cool and the blankets warm and the bed soft and the phone woke me.
    It was only a minute or so later; the shower was still doing its rain dance. But the phone, over on the table by the window, was ringing.
    I sat up, yawned, tasted my mouth (which in one minute had accumulated the unpleasant film and sour breath of a full night’s sleep) and bumped into things as I made my clumsy way across the room to the insistent