The Cocktail Waitress by James M. Cain Read Free Book Online

answered.
    But we both laughed, and knew we’d been playing games. “I thought about you,” he remarked. “All during the night.”
    “And perhaps I thought about you.”
    “How long have you been widowed, Joan?”
    “… Four days.”
    “Four—what did you say?”
    “Days—since late Saturday night. Sunday morning, really.”
    He stared, and I thought I’d better tell him a bit more, at least enough to avoid making a mystery out of it, which I saw no need to do. I went on: “I’m the Joan Medford you probably read about in the papers, who put her husband out of the house, and then was told next day he’d driven off in a borrowed car and crashed it on a culvert —or culvert headwall, I guess it was.”
    “Why—yes, I did read about it. I’m sorry.” And then, as he seemed to remember more: “The police figured in the item I read about it— facing them isn’t so good.”
    “You could say that, Mr. White.”
    And then, since I’d got that far, I went on: “We’d had an argument before I put him out, and I knew nothing about the car, the one a friend had lent him before going off for the weekend, that he drove off in. He was in pajamas, so he had no driver’s license on him, or anything to identify him. So the police, after checking out the car plates, assumed he was Leland Brooks, the owner. But then, when Leland was finally found, at Annapolis where he was spending the weekend, and he came in to the undertaker shop where Ron was, and made identification, it was Sunday afternoon. Then they got me down there, and for two hours I had to face them, answering all sorts of questions. Did I know about the car? Why did I let him drive away? Didn’t I know he’d been drinking?” I shook my head. “Did I know. He announced it at top volume when he walked through the front door and wouldn’t stop announcing it until I brought him a beer, even after it woke our son and started him bawling. And then he was ready to take a belt to him, not just for this crying but for breaking a jar the week before, which he’d done by accident, and anyway it wasn’t a special jar, we just used it to store change, back when we had enough change to be worth storing.”
    “… And you told all this to the police?”
    “All of it, three or four times over. It was a young private and a sergeant, and I could see they weren’t bad people, but they had a bad job to do, and they did it.”
    “You have my sympathy, Joan. I can’t imagine anything worse.”
    “Oh, I can—and you could too if you’d ever been hungry, ever had to stretch a dollar to feed three people. The worst was that I couldn’t possibly bury him, and had to ask help of his family. And on top of that was my little boy, and what to do about him. My sister-in-law took him, and to have any chance of getting him back I had to find work, at once. My coming here was accident—the police suggested this place, and from the bottom of my heart I thank them. It mayseem queer to you, but to me it’s been a godsend. I don’t even mind these clothes.”
    “You shouldn’t. They’re very becoming.”
    “At least they fit.”
    “And rather well.”
    We both laughed again, but then he sat shaking his head, his face becoming quite solemn. “Bereavement’s a terrible thing,” he said, in a low, faraway voice, as though meaning it double extra. “It’s not so bad in itself—a black shadow at the time, but it lifts, give it time, and becomes a memory. But always it has its after effects, which can be very ugly. Joan, my wife died five, almost six years ago, a blow I still haven’t recovered from. But the worst of it wasn’t her, losing her I mean, it was the effect her passing had on her children, my stepchildren, to transform them from a seemingly loving son and daughters into three vultures, who think nothing but money, money, money. Morning, noon, and night, they and the lawyers they have do nothing but hound me ragged, for their shares of their mother’s