Nothing More than Murder by Jim Thompson Read Free Book Online

her grandfather rather, had donated the sites for most of the churches in town, so I guess she felt like they owed her a few favors and they apparently felt the same way.
    Jesus, what a hell of a way to collect! It was like asking to sleep with a man’s wife because he owed you five dollars.
    After that, after I really began to notice things, to do something besides set the film cans in the lobby and beat it, I saw her head for one jam after another. And instead of pointing my nose the other way, I’d jump in and try to give her a straight steer.
    She had trouble spelled all over her. She’d always have it. And I knew it, and I didn’t want it any different—then.
    You don’t buy a twenty-three-jewel watch and hope to turn it into an alarm clock. I didn’t have any idea of ever changing her.
    The funniest deal came up one night over some color film.
    She was using Simplex projectors with nine hundred-watt Mazdas, and the way the stuff came out on the screen was pretty God-awful. Most of the time you could tell the men from the women characters but they all looked like they’d been brawling in a jelly closet.
    “I’m going to make them give me a rebate on this,” she told me. “I’ve never seen such a thing in my life!”
    “You won’t get any rebate,” I said. “This print is brand new; that’s the trouble with it. What little color stuff you’ve played in the past has been old and those Mazdas would shoot through it. But there’s more and more color coming in, and you’ll probably be getting a lot of new prints.”
    “Oh?” She began to look a little sick. “What should I do, Joe?”
    “Get rid of the lamps and put in carbon arcs. They’ll cut through anything.”
    “Are they—pretty expensive?”
    “Well, it’s going to cost you something to convert, sure,” I said. “But you should be able to squeeze around that. Talk it over with your power-and-light man here. Show him how the arcs will burn more juice and it’s to his advantage for you to have them. If you handle it right you might be able to get him to put them in for you.”
    She brightened up and said she’d try it.
    Two weeks later she was still using lamps, and from what little I could get out of her I knew she’d keep right on using them as far as the manager of the power-and-light company was concerned.
    Well, I picked a light night on the route, drove to beat hell for sixteen hours straight, and got back into Stoneville early the next morning. I brushed up a little bit and paid a call on the power company.
    Not that I’d expected him to be, but the manager wasn’t an imbecile or a boor or a grafter. He was just a pretty pleasant citizen who’d spent a lot of time learning his business. And he wasn’t going to let anyone tell him where to get off, even if he had been trotting around town with his tail sticking out at a time when she had six dresses for every day in the week.
    I don’t know what I said to him. Nothing in particular, I guess. We sat around and talked for thirty minutes or so and went out and had coffee together, and that was all there was to it. Two days later the arcs went in.
    I could tell you some more things along the same line, but there wouldn’t be too much point to it. The time’s better used, probably, in mentioning that she’d found out plenty about me. About all there was to find out.
    Her mother was pretty feeble, and I used to inquire about her. So sooner or later, of course, she had to inquire about mine—about my folks. And that brought up the orphanage, and one thing led to another. At first I told her I’d picked up the projectionist trade when I was in the orphanage. But then I remembered telling her I’d skipped out of the joint when I was fourteen, and, rather than look like a liar, I told her the truth.
    “Was the reform—the industrial school very bad, Joe?”
    “I thought it was at the time,” I said. “But after I saw a few—”
    I told her about the jails.
    I told her how it