1958 - Not Safe to be Free Read Online Free

a scarlet pendulum. He continued to stare at her.
    “Did you hear me?” she said, raising her voice.
    “How did you guess?” he said. He waved his hand towards his bedroom door. “You are quite right. As a matter of fact—she’s in there now.”
     

Chapter Two
     
    I
     
    T here had been a time when Joe Kerr had been considered by editors and agents as a top-flight journalist: probably the best in the game.
    There had been a time when Joe could call his agent, tell him he was going over to London or Paris or Rome or wherever it was to cover some special event, and, within the hour, his agent had sold the article, sight unseen and had also got a generous expense allocation to cover the cost of the trip.
    At that time Joe could not only write brilliantly but he was also a class photographer and that made a very lucrative combination.
    He reached the peak of his success in 1953. He not only had a book chosen by the Atlantic Book of the Month Club, but he also had a profile running for three weeks in the
    New Yorker and Life had given a five-page spread to his remarkable photographs of the birth of a baby. But the highlight of that year for him was his marriage with a nice but thoroughly ordinary girl, whose name was Martha Jones.
    Martha and he set up home at Malvern, which was a little over an hour’s run from Philadelphia, Joe’s working headquarters. Married life agreed with Joe. Martha and he were as happy together as two people really in love can be happy. Then something happened that was to alter completely the rhythm of Joe’s life.
    One night coming back from a rather wild party, Joe, not exactly drunk, but certainly fuddled, accidentally killed his wife.
    They had driven back to their home in Joe’s Cadillac, with Joe driving. He knew he was a little high and he had driven the thirty odd miles with extreme care. He was carrying with him his most precious possession and he wasn’t going to put her in the slightest danger just because he had had one whisky too many and was a little dizzy in the head.
    They arrived home without incident and Martha got out of the car to open the garage doors while Joe slid the automatic gear into reverse and had his foot on the brake pedal.
    As Martha was about to open the garage doors, Joe’s foot slipped off the pedal and the car began to move backwards. Fuddled and realizing Martha was directly behind the car, Joe stamped down hard on the brake pedal, missed it and his foot descended on the accelerator.
    The massive car swept back at a speed that made it impossible for Martha to jump clear.
    She was smashed against the garage doors and, with the splintered and broken doors, hurled into the garage and crushed against the back brick wall.
    Joe never recovered from this experience. From the moment he got out of the car and ran to the lifeless body of his wife, he began to go downhill.
    He began to drink. He lost his touch and editors soon discovered he could no longer be relied on. After a while, the assignments didn’t come to him and the articles he wrote lost their bite and didn’t sell.
    Anyone knowing him in 1953 wouldn’t have recognized him as he shambled up the drive of the Plaza hotel after his brief conversation with Jay Delaney when he had hopefully asked if Jay could arrange an interview for him with Jay’s father.
    Joe Kerr was a tall, thin man who looked a lot older than his forty odd years. He stooped as he walked and he was always a little short of breath. His hair, the colour of sand, was thin and lank, but it was his raddled plum-coloured face that shocked people meeting him for the first time.
    Since the death of his wife, he had been drinking two bottles of whisky a day and his face was now a mass of tiny broken veins. With his ruined face, his watery frog’s eyes and his shabby clothes, he looked beaten and broken and people moved out of his way when he approached them.
    Somehow, he still managed to scrape up a living. He was now employed by a