The Philadelphia Murder Story by Leslie Ford Read Free Book Online

“About this… woman she was talking about. I don’t think Myron knows that. And the judge wouldn’t mind anyway. He loved her very deeply. He tried every way there was to marry her. He’s not ashamed of it. It’s just that Elsie doesn’t understand. Of course she wouldn’t. If that came out in The Saturday Evening Post, he wouldn’t mind at all, because no story of his life would be true without her. His friends all knew it. It was when Elsie and Sam came and dared to talk about disgrace that I saw him angry.”
    “But of course that’s not the kind of thing they’d want to print, anyway,” I said.
    She looked at me for an instant and changed the subject entirely. “That’s not what we’re talking about, is it? It’s the other thing we’ve got to stop—even if I have to marry Myron Kane to stop it.”
    She stood looking down, lost in the dancing movement of the flames along the oak logs.
    “And I would marry him, if it was the only way out,” she said slowly, at last. “I’d hate him for it. But what she said is right. It is my fault. But I’d have to know it was the only way. So, if you’re ready, I’d like you to go with me to see Travis.”
    “Travis?” I asked. I would have thought Judge Whitney was the person to see, and I said so.
    “Do you think I’d dare go and tell him I’d heard he killed somebody? I wouldn’t want him ever to know I knew, in the first place. And he’d die before he’d let me marry somebody to save him anything. You don’t know him. Travis is a first-rate lawyer, and he adores the judge. Maybe he’ll-Oh, I just don’t know. It’s just that he and I are the ones that owe him the most—more than Elsie or Monk, really.”
    I couldn’t think of anything at all to say.
    “So if you’re ready, I wish you’d go with me. Now that you know, too, and you’re a friend of Myron’s. Maybe there’s something we can do.”
    I was more than a little dubious about it, especially at being on a basis of friendship with Myron, but I went upstairs, got my coat and galoshes and came down again. She was waiting for me in the lower hall, standing by the door, her forehead pressed against the glass to cool what must have been a throbbing ache inside it.
    The sleet had almost stopped, but it was bitterly cold with the wind whipping through the naked branches of the buttonwood trees in the square, and the sidewalks like glass underfoot. We cut across the corner of the square into 19th Street again and went along across Spruce to Delancey Place, and turned right. It was like walking into a different period, with the old gaslights shimmering under the trees that lined each side of the narrow, empty street. It had escaped the blight fallen on the others around it, as it jogged in and out at angles useless for streetcars and inconvenient for any traffic, and the brownstone and brick houses had a remote and quiet dignity retained from a lost older day.
    We’d gone about halfway along the block, silent since we’d left the square, when Laurel touched my arm and stopped abruptly.
    “Look,” she said.
    A man had come hurriedly down the steps of a house a little farther along. As she spoke, his feet shot out from under him on the icy steps and he landed at the bottom, catching himself grotesquely on the railing, his stick flying out of his hand and his hat rolling to the curb. He picked himself up quickly, retrieved his hat and cane, started our way, I thought, then turned and went rapidly off in the other. It was Myron Kane.
    “That’s Travis’ house,” Laurel said. “What do you suppose—”
    She stopped, her hand closing on my arm sharply.
    A man had disengaged himself from the shadow of the tree on the other side of the street and was crossing over. He came into the perimeter of light in front of Travis Elliot’s house, stepped up onto the curb and stood there waiting for us.
    “What are you two gals doing here?” he asked. It wasn’t till then that I recognized Monk