Wild by Gil Brewer Read Free Book Online

letters?”
    “Where are they?”
    “I tried to tell you before. This isn’t going to get us anywhere. You’ll have to answer my questions, or it won’t work.”
    She looked away. “Sorry.” She sat there like that, a very beautiful woman, and mixed up. “I guess I don’t want to discuss those letters any more.”
    “You saw Carl a week or so ago, in your bedroom.”
    “Yes.”
    “Does your sister know about you and Carl?”
    “Ivor? Dear, sweet Ivor? No, I don’t believe she knows.”
    “Do you think she might have found out?”
    She looked at me again and licked her lips.
    I said, “You think if she found out, she might want to do something about it?”
    “Like killing Carl?”
    I shrugged.
    She dropped her hand, put both hands together, and spaded them between her thighs. She thrust the dress between her thighs. “I suppose it could happen.”
    “Nothing much excites you.”
    “Some things do. Things that are directly concerned with me.” She slid around on the hassock until she was facing me in the chair again. She leaned back on her elbows. “I’m very selfish. All I care about are sensations.”
    “You have a lot of them.”
    “No. I’ll never have enough.”
    “What are we getting at?”
    “I want to sleep with you.”
    The room warmed. It was as if somebody had turned on the furnace.
    I said, “Sex is everything.”
    “To me, it is. For instance, I want you, and I’m going to get you.”
    “What about him?” I nodded toward the hall.
    “Elk? He’s all right. He’s fine. Don’t worry about Elk. There’s no shim-shamming. He knows what I like. When I married him, I told him I’d never be happy sleeping just with him.”
    “Yet, he married you anyway?”
    She nodded. “Yes, you see Elk’s a kind of a poet. He’s still very much in love with Carol. I look an awful lot like Carol. Practically the spitting image. I’ll show you a picture sometimes.”
    “Who’s Carol?”
    “His first wife.”
    “Where does the poetry come in?”
    “She’s been dead for seven years.”
    I said nothing for a moment.
    She said, “Shall we go up to my room, now?”
    “Not now.”
    “I can wait. If you don’t make me wait too long. Then I get nasty.” She hesitated. “Actually,” she said. “I’m very surprised and sorry to hear about Carl. I mean, someplace, I do feel sorry about it. It just doesn’t make me jump up and down with horror, for some reason. My selfishness again, I suppose—I was tired of him.” She shrugged. “I don’t suppose that’s normal.”
    I still said nothing.
    She said, “Who found him?”
    “I did.”
    “Where?”
    I told her about it, in detail. She didn’t blink.
    “That’s pretty awful,” she said. “I’d rather not hear any more about it. I’m beginning to react to it.”
    I stared at her.
    “I don’t want to dream about it,” she said. “I can think of much pleasanter things.”
    “Asa, could I use your phone?”
    “You can use anything I’ve got, darling.”
    “You’re plastered. The phone will do. For now.”
    “I’m going to be plastereder. In the hall.”
    I got up and went into the hall. The telephone was in a small alcove. I called Hoagy Stills’ home. His wife came on hard and fast and bright with the information that the last time I’d called, the phone ringing woke him. She began taking me apart. I heard a bottle neck clink against a glass from the Crafford living room. A man’s voice reached me over the phone. Small argument. Gasp.
    “Hello?”
    “This is Lee Baron, Hoagy. Sorry to bust up the household like this.”
    More asides. Two more gasps. Hoagy and I had gone to school together. He was a smart gee. We’d had lunch together three days ago, talking over old times. If I couldn’t get anything from him now I might have to start consulting the crystal ball.
    “All right, Lee. What is it?”
    “You can go back to sleep in a sec,” I said. “Tell Jane I’ll buy her a box of candy.”
    “She’s on a diet.