Death of an Angel Read Online Free

out all right, cousins?” he asked, and beamed at them. “Wonderfully,” Pam said. “It’s a wonderful party.” Fitch went on. He was a large man; he moved with remarkable grace. “Like a big cat,” Pam said. “They’ll all be very annoyed at us.”
    â€œThey,” Jerry said, “will be asleep on all the chairs they are supposed to stay off of. Leaving cat hair.”
    That the Norths’ three cats would be doing precisely that was obvious; that they would, in time, arise to express the vociferous protest of abandoned Siamese equally went without saying.
    â€œNow,” Pam said, “we’re doing it. Where is Miss Shaw? Because that’s it, isn’t it? It’s her party, more than Mr. Strothers’. More even than Sammy’s. What is there about her?”
    â€œShe’s good-looking,” Jerry said. “She’s a good actress. I don’t mean a Helen Hayes, but—”
    Pam was shaking her head. He stopped.
    â€œThere’s more than that,” Pam said.
    â€œSure,” Jerry said. “The indescribable something, and I quote from somebody.”
    â€œFrom everybody,” Pam said. “She—” Pam stopped. She was looking toward the door from the foyer. There was a stir there. Bradley Fitch, tall enough to show above the others, seemed the center of the stir.
    But he was not. The stir moved into the room, and now most of those in the room were aware of it. And Fitch was not the center—or was, at best, a segment of the center, an adjunct of the center.
    The center was a small and beautifully arranged young woman in a gold evening dress which left perfect shoulders bare. The center was a young woman of twenty-five, born Mary Shaftlich on Independence Avenue in Kansas City, Missouri, daughter of the manager of a chain grocery store; graduate of Northeast High School, where she had “taken elocution” and of the Heart of America Business College, from which she had emerged as an only moderately competent stenographer. The center was, in other words, Naomi Shaw.
    â€œWhy,” Pam North said, looking at Naomi across the room, “she’s really gay, isn’t she?”
    Sometimes one may toss a single match into a smoldering fire, and find that flame leaps up. Sometimes a party comes alight.…
    â€œIt’s a wonderful party,” Pam North was saying, half an hour later, this time to a handsome young man named Sidney Castle—who danced perfectly—and this time meaning it. There had been another room behind the big room with the chandelier, and here the floor was bare and polished, and here there was a small orchestra. (And another bar. Mr. Fitch did things perfectly; that could no longer be denied.) Voices were generally somewhat louder by then, but they seemed (which was absurd) to have become more melodious.
    â€œTops,” Sidney Castle said. “Absolutely tops.”
    It was, Pam thought absently, not so much what he said as the way he said it. He was a very expert dancer; she could look anywhere she liked. She could see Jerry dancing with—oh yes, that Mrs. Nelson. And there was dear old Jasper with—why, that was the girl with the famous laugh. She looked much smaller in real life, and much prettier, too. And Sam Wyatt—Sam of all people!—was dancing with Naomi Shaw, who was laughing at something he had said and looked, in that instant, as she must have looked at the Junior Prom at Northeast High (only rather differently dressed, of course) and seemed without pretense. And there was—
    The music stopped. Sidney Castle bowed. He was an expert bower, too. Jerry came toward them and he had the expression—but how could he have?—of a man who is beginning to think it’s about time to go home. And then—
    A horn in the little orchestra sounded “Attention!”—sounded it softly, almost tenderly. And now Naomi Shaw was standing