Death Trap Read Online Free Page A

alibi for the time. April the sixth, I think it was. Anyway, it was a Friday. His sister had a date. She’d come over here by bus in the middle of the afternoon to do some shopping and the guy she was dating met her over here for dinner. She didn’t take the car because it was in the repair garage. Landy got it out of the garage at five. The service manager said the kid acted funny. He drove back to the apartment. The prosecution proved the car was there at five-fifteen and gone by five-thirty. He was in the habit of going and taking rides all by himself. His sister testified to that. He was a funny-acting kid. No friends. He said he got back to the house about nine. His sister said he was asleep when she got back. He didn’t have a date with Nancy Paulson because they’d had some sort of a scrap that week.” He looked at his watch. “Hell, I’ve got to be rolling, fellow. You should have seen this town when the trial was going on. All the wire services and television and hundreds of newspaper guys and cranks from all over. That little town and the college won’t recover for a long time.”
    He paid his bar check and as he started to leave, I said, “Is the sister still around?”
    “I suppose so. I don’t know.”
     
    I drove over to Dalton the next morning. It was a beautiful fall morning. The leaves of the big trees in the square were changing. The town had changed very little. The Dalton National Bank had had a face-lifting. Some of the stores had new plastic fronts. A Friday, the fourteenth of October. The same pre-school kids were fumbling around with the same soggy football in the park. Two young housewives walked diagonally across the park, talking as they pushed the carriages, groceries piled in beside the kids. There was a new traffic light where College Street came out onto the square. The red bus to Warrentown was waiting in the same place as before.
    I parked, locked the wagon, and walked slowly in the sunlight and I knew she was in the town. I knew she was close. And I wanted to turn and run. I was ashamed of what I was—or what I had been.
    I was wondering who to ask when I thought of a very simple solution. The phone had been disconnected but it was probably still listed. And it was. Landy, Victoria, 28 Maple. I knew Maple ran into the square at the north. I walked. Number twenty-eight was a block and a half down Maple, on the left. It was a big, elderly frame house painted an ugly reddish brown. There was a shallow porch around two sides, an ornate cupola, stained glass windows on either side of the front door, a waist-high iron fence.
    An old lady was raking leaves in the yard. She wore a blue and white print dress and a man’s green cardigan sweater much too big for her. When I turned in at the walk she stopped raking and watched me as I walked up to her. She had hard little eyes and a mean little mouth.
    “Yes?”
    “I’m looking for a Miss Landy.”
    “Around at the side, but she won’t talk to any newspaper or magazine people. Don’t cut across my lawn. You go on out to the sidewalk and back in that other gate over there. She’s packing and she’ll be gone by Monday and let me tell you there won’t be anybody in this neighborhood or this whole town that won’t be glad to see the last of anybody around here with the name Landy. I wanted to get her out of my house before, but Jud Cowan told me so long as she paid her rent I didn’t have any way of getting rid of her. It seems like a very strange law, to me that says a decent woman has to put up with having the sister of a murderer living in her very own house and not be able to do anything about it.”
    The shrill whining voice followed me until I was around the corner of the house and out of sight. Though the front yard was narrow, the grounds behind the house seemed extensive. A small conservatory bulged from the flank of the house. It was an architectural afterthought, with narrow windows and an ugly roof. The path led to two