The Kill-Off by Jim Thompson Read Free Book Online Page B

valves…?”
    “The wildeyed bastard is crazy, that’s all! I leave it to you, Charlie. You ever hear me slide in or off a note? I ever have to feel for ’em? Why…”
    They were all chiming in, trying to top one another. But the drummer finally got and held the floor. I listened to his complaints—the bitter low-pitched voice. And I was both startled and hurt.
    Possibly I had seemed a little sharp to the others, but I certainly hadn’t meant to. I had only been joking, trying to make light of something that could not be helped. With the drummer, however, I had been especially gentle—exceedingly careful to do or say nothing that might hurt his pride. He had nothing at all to feel bitter about that I could see.
    It was true that I had joked with him, but in the mildest of ways. I had not so much corrected him as tried to get him to correct himself.
    I had tossed him a bag of peanuts on one occasion. On a couple of others I had suddenly held a mirror in front of him, at the height of his idiotic, orgiastic contortions. I had had him look at himself, that was all. I had said nothing. It was pointless to say anything, since English was even more than a mystery to him than music, and I saw no necessity to. It seemed best simply to let him look at himself—at the man become monkey. And how that could possibly have made him sore, why he should blame me for the way he looked…
    Well, the hell with it. He wasn’t worth worrying about or bothering with. None of them were. Only Danny Lee—Danny Lee’s voice. I wished to God I could have gotten hold of her a couple of years sooner. By now, she’d have been at the top, so good that she wouldn’t have been caught dead in a place like this.
    I shaved and bathed and dressed. I walked over to her cottage, and told her to show at the pavilion at two o’clock sharp.
    Then I dropped in on the boys.
    They saw or heard me coming, for their voices rose suddenly in awkward self-conscious conversation. I went in, and there was a stilted exchange of greetings, and a heavy silence. And then two of them offered me coffee at the same time.
    I declined, said I was eating in town. “By the way,” I added. “Can I do anything for you guys in town? Mail some letters to the local for you?”
    They knew I’d heard them then. I looked at them smiling, one eyebrow cocked; glancing from one sheepish, reddening, silly face to another.
    No one said a word. No one made a move. They almost seemed to have stopped breathing. And I stared at them, and suddenly I was sick with shame.
    I mumbled that everything was Jake. I told them they’d better get out and have some fun; to rent a boat, buy some swim trunks—anything they needed—and to charge it to me.
    “No rehearsal today,” I said. “None any day.”
    I got out of there.
    I ate and went to the pavilion, and went to work with Danny Lee.
    After a while, Ralph Devore showed up.
    Ralph’s the handyman-janitor here. Also the floorman—the guy who moves around among the dancers, and maintains order and so on. He’s a hell of a handsome guy, vaguely reminiscent of someone I seem to have seen in pictures. He has a convertible Mercedes, which, I understand, he got through some elaborate chiseling. And dressed up in those fancy duds he has (given to him by wealthy summer people) he looks like a matinee idol. But he wasn’t dressed up now. Now, when Danny Lee was seeing him for the first time, he looked like Bowery Bill from Trashcan Hill.
    She was so burned up when he gave her a hand—and I kidded her about it—that she flounced her butt at him.
    She stomped off to the dressing room. Ralph and I chewed the fat a little. And I began to get a very sweet idea, a plan for giving Miss Danny her comeuppance. I could see that Ralph had fallen for her. He wanted her so bad he could taste it. So with him looking as he did—or could—and Danny being what she was…
    I put it up to Ralph, giving him slightly less than the facts about Danny. I said that