The Threateners by Donald Hamilton Read Free Book Online

professional woman!” She laughed again. “Well, we’ve pretty well taken care of that, haven’t we? See the high-class lady lawyer lying on the untidy bed all naked and tanglehaired and sweaty with her high-class lady-lawyer costume scattered over the floor getting all wrinkled and dusty. God, it’s like getting out of a goddamn straitjacket!” After a little pause she went on: “Walter would have hung it all up neatly for me, you know, before he allowed himself to join me. He was a very neat boy.”
    I said, “That’s why you married him, wasn’t it, for his nearness and respectability?”
    She nodded. “But it wasn’t one of my very best ideas. After spending years being pushed around in prison and then coming home to receive the ex-con treatment—you remember—I wasn’t thinking very straight, I guess. I just wanted to show all those smug, self-righteous bastards. . . . But I shouldn’t talk mean about Walter. I gave him such a hell of a time toward the end, poor guy, and he never did figure out why. He thought it was because I was in love with you.”
    “Gosh, aren’t you?”
    Her face was suddenly unsmiling in the dusk. “Don’t be silly, Matt. I have to hate you, don’t you know that?”
    “You have a funny way of showing it.”
    She licked her lips. “Why shouldn’t I hate you? You practically brought me back from the dead, and I don’t just mean the way you stopped a bullet to protect me. I owe you a ridiculous debt of gratitude, and the fact that at the end I managed to save your life a little doesn’t go very far toward canceling the awful obligation. . . . Don’t all debtors detest their creditors? And you, you bastard, you saw me the way I was when I got out of prison, a flabby, broken-down, self-pitying . . . How can I help hating a man who remembers me like that? How can I help hating the man who practically rebuilt me from scratch? I bet that monster he created hated Dr. Frankenstein’s guts for doing such a clumsy job. Well, I’m your very own do-it-yourself female monster, darling; and you’d better figure out what to do with me, now that you’ve got me all constructed, because you seem to have built me so I don’t function too well by myself.”
    I looked at her for a moment without speaking; then I sat up and reached over the side of the bed for a couple of garments, passing her a creamy slip with lace top and bottom and satin in between, and hauling on my own well-worn white cotton-and-polyester shorts, JC Penney’s best.
    She looked at the lingerie in her hands and smiled faintly. “You got something against nude women, buster?”
    “That’s asking for a dirty crack, but I’ll restrain myself. Put it on, if you want to have zee great Herr Doktor Matthias Helmstein his mind on your problems keep. Another drink?"
    “If you’re planning to feed me some lunch pretty soon to soak it up.”
    “That can be arranged.”
    When I returned with two glasses, she’d smoothed out the bedspread we’d rumpled and piled up the pillows we’d tossed aside. She looked like a little girl sitting there demurely against them, bare-legged and bare-shouldered in her pretty slip. I noted, however, that the little girl had been adult enough to run a quick comb through her tousled hair and make hasty repairs to her damaged lipstick. I noted also that she hadn’t bothered to pick up her suit or blouse or stockings, leaving them on the floor with her high-heel shoes like the fragmented, discarded shell of a past stage of her development. I wasn’t about to disturb any significant symbols of liberation she wanted to leave lying around, so I stepped over the crumpled clothes and, after giving her both glasses to hold, settled myself beside her and retrieved one.
    “Ve vill now zee analysis commence,” I said, after taking a healthy sip. "What’s bugging you besides a bunch of snoops in your hair, babe?”
    She said, “I’m not making it, Matt.”
    I regarded her for a moment. Fear