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

accident. One of those things that can happen and it’s really nobody’s fault. The only thing to show was from the first time, and that had been her lip swollen and the cut inside it where this tooth back here is turned a little crooked, the one the dentist said didn’t matter becauseit didn’t show and it would be hard to try to straighten it. The front ones had always been straight so there never had to be any of those braces.
    She sat on the bench in front of her dressing table and put her heel up on the bench, soaked cotton in nail polish remover and began to take the old cracked nail polish from her toes.
    There was no way that Mr. Keefler could possibly know she had seen Danny twice. Once about two weeks ago—no, it was a little more than two weeks because it was on Friday, on Friday in the morning and that would make it two weeks ago yesterday. He hurt her mouth and when Lee saw it she told him the thing she made up about it, about how she was getting the hat box down off the top shelf of the closet and it slipped and hit her in the mouth.
    It was one of those things that just happened. It hadn’t been meant to happen either time, either fifteen days ago or Thursday, the day before yesterday. But maybe he meant for it to happen Thursday because he didn’t leave his car in front like before.
    She remembered how it was when Danny stopped on that Friday morning. She remembered she’d set the ironing board up and she was ironing the candy-striped skirt, the one with the tricky little pleats that you had to be careful about. And the television was on in the living room. You could sort of follow what was going on by listening, even if it was kind of hard sometimes, and then if it sounded exciting, you could hurry in and look at it and then come back out when it got dull again. She remembered she had been ironing the candy-striped skirt on account of Ruthie was going to come by about two and they were going to go down to the matinee of that new Bill Holden one. She wanted to wear it on account of it was a stinking hot day and it was a cool skirt and, because Lee had the car, they were going to walk to the bus and once you got downtown it was another four blocks nearly to the State. So she had decided to wear the candy-stripe with just a half slip. The white rayon blouse was thick enough and full enough so she was going to get away without wearing a bra no matter if Ruthie did makesome smart crack about her bobbling all over the place. Ruthie made those cracks on account of if she didn’t wear a bra she’d be all hanging down to her belt practically. It was funny Earl didn’t pick up a good buy in a used car for Ruthie, seeing as how he worked at that business and could get a good one, but it looked like he was as stingy as Lee almost.
    Anyway, it had been something after eleven, maybe a quarter after, and the skirt was nearly done when she heard the familiar creak of the middle step of the three steps up to the small back porch and then a big man just outside the screen door with the sun behind him so she couldn’t tell who it was, even when the man said, “Hi, Lucille.”
    When she started to the door he pushed it open and came in and she saw it was Danny, Lee’s brother. She didn’t know him well, having seen him only two or three times and then Lee had been there and a lot of the time the two of them had talked about people she had never heard of. It felt kind of funny to be alone with him, because she couldn’t keep from thinking about how he’d been in jail three times and he was really a kind of a gangster. She remembered how Lee had told her parents about his brother Danny and how they’d been so upset about it they’d practically wanted to call the whole thing off. Lee could have kept it to himself and saved all that trouble, but that was Lee for you. He always had to go ahead and do just what he thought was the right thing to do, no matter what it cost people.
    She remembered the first time she had