The Price of Murder by John D. MacDonald Read Free Book Online Page A

turned Judson in. I got him picked up. I appear against him in the morning. I’m covering my list. You cover yours.”
    “I’ll appear, too.”
    “Suit yourself,” he said and walked out. The law was the law. He had the proof. He presented it. Terry Judson went back to finish out his term. Richardson nearly found himself in contempt of court.
    So tonight, after squeezing some sweat out of Talliaferro, he decided he would drop in on Connie Judson again. She was a hefty healthy redhead, and the rearrest of Judson had taken all the steam out of her. It wasn’t his fault she got the idea he could get Terry sprung again. She was willing to put out. There wasn’t much life in her, but how much choice did a one-handed guy have? Her heavy freckled legs didn’t compare with the professor’s piece, but it was a very nice thing to lie there and have a cigarette and think about Terry Judson back in the box, and think how you put him there. When she cried she didn’t make much noise.
    How much choice would you have if you didn’t lean on them a little? And Judson was just another punk. He had a habit of writing worthless checks when he got tight. And after he got out he’d get the habit again.
    His hand ached—the hand that was gone. Sometimes he felt like they’d buried it under a heavy stone, a cold stone. He often wondered what they’d done with it.
    God damn that kid!
    All the bad ones deserved was a sudden death and a dirty one. As dirty as Kowalsik’s.
    He bit the inside of his cheek. “I’ll get them all, Mose,” he said to himself. “I’ll get them all for you.”
    He could still feel the rough affection of the hand that had rumpled his no-color hair, had patted the shy head of a scared kid in the waiting room of the Home.
    And he felt something weep inside when he saw again Mose’s ashy face and helpless clutching hands.
    “Every one of them, Mose.”
    Mose wore the face of Christ.
    And they had done that thing to him.
    They had all done it. The Bronsons and Judson and Talliaferro. The G.I.s in that stockade had done it too, and answered for it in yelps of anguish as the billy stick splintered shin bone.
    Keefler warred against all the foulness in the world, against everyone who had helped hold the knife that had spilled Mose onto the dirty sidewalk of the Sink. In his mind, even Lee Bronson had helped hold that knife.
    When he got off the bus his lips were moving and there was a quiet madness in his eyes. And he hit the artificial hand against his thigh so as to feel more clearly the aching and the pain.

CHAPTER THREE
Lucille Bronson
    She paused in the living room, head tilted to one side, and tried to hear what that man named Keefler was saying to Lee, but the man kept his voice too low. In the silence of the small house she could hear the excited beat of her heart, the heavy high-placed thudding. There was no way of knowing how much or how little Keefler knew. She had not liked the look of him. He had mean, wise little blue eyes, and he had looked at her in a way that was too knowing.
    She went back through the living room and into the bedroom, shrugged out of the beach coat and flung it on the chair. Her suit was nearly dry. She stepped out of her clogs, peeled her suit down and stepped out of it, walked through into the bathroom and hung it over the edge of the tub. She paused briefly in front of the mirror over the sink and looked at the puckered marks the tight bra built into the suit had made on her breasts.
    When she walked back into the bedroom, she went to her bureau to get clean underthings, and then changed her mind as she realized that some slight tactical advantage might be obtained by remaining naked. That is, if Keefler knew anything and had told Lee. But she didn’t know how Keefler could know anything.
    It had only happened twice. But if Lee found out, it wasn’t going to make him feel any better to know it had only happened twice, and the first time it was really sort of like an