It's a Sin to Kill Read Online Free

slept.”
    â€œSome,” she admitted. “Not much.” She studied his face and cried silently. “You might have wiped off the lipstick.”
    Ames sat on the opposite bunk. The pad felt thin, hard, familiar. “I tried to. Look, honey.” He put his hand on her knee and Mary Lou slapped it away.
    â€œDon’t touch me.”
    â€œOkay,” Ames said. “You know where I’ve been?”
    â€œHow could I help knowing? It’s all up and down the basin.”
    Ames swallowed the lump in his throat. “I didn’t mean it to happen. I don’t know it did.”
    Mary Lou set her mug of coffee on the edge of the galley stove without rising from the bunk. “What do you mean by that?”
    Ames’s growing panic continued to mount. He had a feeling of wanting to run, looking back over his shoulder as Mrs. Camden’s French maid had done on the Camden pier. He gripped the edge of the bunk until his fingers ached.“Just what I said. I don’t remember a goddamn thing except drinking coffee with her in the cockpit of the
Sally
.”
    â€œThat’s your story.”
    â€œYeah.” The word was more an expulsion of air than a sound. “I’d just come in from catching my bait. I was making a pot of coffee when she came out on the pier and asked me how much I’d charge to skipper the
Sea Bird
down to the Keys then up to Baltimore.”
    â€œMrs. Camden?”
    â€œYeah. I said I’d have to think it over. Then she asked if she smelled coffee. I said she did. She asked if she could have a cup. I invited her to come aboard and I gave her a cup of coffee. And that’s the last I remember.”
    Mary Lou’s eyes continued to look sullen. “Ha.”
    â€œI mean it,” Ames insisted. His breathless earnestness gave force to his words. “When I stop loving you like I do, when I start stepping out on you, honey, I — ” He tried to go on and couldn’t.
    â€œYou’ll what?” Mary Lou asked.
    â€œI just couldn’t.”
    â€œBut you did.”
    â€œNo,” Ames said. He modified his denial. “At least I don’t remember it.”
    â€œAll you remember is drinking a cup of coffee?”
    â€œYeah.”
    The corner of Mary Lou’s lips turned down as she stood up. She caught the long skirt by the hem, pulled her evening gown over her head and tossed it on the bunk on which she’d been sitting. She was wearing a strapless divided lace bra. She exchanged it for a stout cotton one. She took a street dress from the small locker that served as a joint clothes closet and put it on. Then, while Ames watched her in silence, she shook out her shoulder-length page boy bob and combed it. She opened her purse and powdered her nose and renewed her lips. Her lips renewed to her satisfaction, she dropped her lipstick back in her purse, snapped it with a sharp click of finality, tucked her purse under her arm and started for the door.
    Ames asked, “Where are you going?”
    A new freshet of tears carved small channels in the powder Mary Lou had just applied. “I don’t know,” she said. She continued to cry silently. “But I’m not stayinghere. It’s bad enough, this happening, without you lying to me.”
    â€œI’m not lying.”
    Ames caught her skirt and Mary Lou slapped him.
    â€œKeep your hands off me. I suppose you got lipstick on your face and skivy drinking coffee.” There was a small jar of
helene camden
cleansing cream on the shelf that served Mary Lou as a dressing table. She snatched the jar from the shelf and smashed it on the deck. “The blonde bitch would use indelible lipstick!”
    A gob of cold scream from the shattered jar splattered the leg of Ames’s dungarees. He picked it off, wiped his fingers on his skivy and returned his hands to the edge of the bunk. He was afraid and didn’t know why. The lump in his throat was