The Dishonest Murderer by Frances Lockridge Read Free Book Online Page A

looked at her a moment without speaking. Then, abruptly, he nodded.
    â€œYou and I,” he said. He turned to the sergeant. “You have a car?” he asked.
    Sergeant Blake nodded.
    â€œThen,” Freddie said. “Now?”
    Sergeant Blake nodded again. He said, “Please.”
    It was going too quickly, Freddie thought. It was ending too quickly. It took too little time to get a coat, too little time down in the elevator, too little time in the car to the police mortuary. There was a wait, then, in an anteroom, and now, strangely, the waiting was too long, although in fact it was brief. Sergeant Blake had left them; then he returned. He held open a door.
    A man in white pulled back a sheet which had covered a face.
    The blackness swirled in again, she fought it back, fought out of it. She heard her voice.
    â€œYes,” Freddie Haven said. “Yes. It is Senator Kirkhill.”
    She felt her father’s arm around her shoulders. But the blackness was going away. She was not going to faint. It was merely a kind of numbness. It was as if this were happening, had to be happening, to somebody else.

III
    Saturday, 3:25 A.M. to 5:05 A.M.
    There was really nothing difficult about inserting a key into a keyhole. You held the key very firmly, approached the keyhole slowly, deliberately, with confidence, and the key went in. That was all there was to it; you did it dozens of times a day. Well, you did it several times a day. It was, Jerry North decided, probably the basic operation of civilization. Civilization was distinguished from non-civilization by keyholes and keys to put into them; a man’s place in the world was assured, or at least not hopelessly precarious, so long as he had a ring of keys in his pocket and those keys, or a majority of them, fitted keyholes to which he had unchallenged access. If you were in a very assured position, you had a great many keys; probably if you were of the mighty, you had so many that a servant carried your keys for you. But the key to your own front door was the basic key, and all you had to do was hold it very firmly in your right hand, move it toward the keyhole with assurance, twist it to the right, so—
    â€œJerry,” Pam said. She was leaning against the corridor wall, waiting. She had seemed to be fast asleep. “Jerry,” Pam said, “why don’t you open the door? I want to go to bed.”
    â€œWhat,” Jerry North said, with gravity, with precision, “do you think I am doing, Pamela?”
    â€œChinking,” Pam said. “Clinking. Making funny noises. Why don’t you use the front door key?”
    â€œI—” Jerry began, haughtily. Then he looked. “Naturally I’m using the front door key,” he said. It was true now, at any rate. He had, perhaps, while thinking about civilization, momentarily tried to unlock the apartment door with the key to his office desk, but now he was using the proper key. Pam had no business—
    â€œYou,” Jerry told Pamela, “are sound asleep.”
    â€œI certainly am,” Pam said. “I can go to sleep right here. Leaning against the wall, waiting for you—”
    Jerry put the key to the apartment door lock into the keyhole of the apartment door lock. The trouble with civilization, he thought, was that it gave you too many keys; it imposed the strain of remembering which key entered which keyhole. All over the world, he thought, as he turned the key (so, to the right) men are suffering nervous breakdowns because they have too many keys, too many keyholes, minds too limited to cope with variation so multiplied. He was, he realized, on the verge of a thought of profundity; just beyond the fingertips of his mind was, in all probability, Solution. He would have to tell Pam—
    He pushed the door and it opened. Three cats sat in a semicircle regarding the Norths. Pam North moved to Jerry and he put an arm around her.
    â€œCarry me over the