Murderers' Row Read Online Free Page B

understand and sympathize, up to a point.”
    â€œA point?” she whispered. “What point?”
    I said, “It wasn’t nice of you to fool the kid who just left. It wasn’t nice, Jean, and it wasn’t smart. Why do you think we sent a green youngster to keep an eye on an experienced operative like you? When you seduced him and tricked him—and made contact with certain other people right under his nose—when you did that, you crossed a line. You gave yourself away. We’d been wondering about you. You told us what we needed to know.”
    She gasped, “But I haven’t really done —I haven’t really told them—I never meant to go through with—” She swallowed hard. “I was just—a little crazy, I guess.”
    â€œIt is,” I said, deliberately, “a form of insanity that we can’t afford to tolerate. I’m sorry.”
    Don’t blame us for the dialogue. Somebody wrote it for us in Washington. Jean stared at me for a moment longer. Her eyes were that china-blue color that never looks real in anyone’s but a child’s face. They disturbed me, and I saw another disturbing thing: the glass, which she’d kept hidden from me, was full to within an inch of the top with straight whisky—it had to be that, since there was no water nearer than the bathroom, and she hadn’t gone in there.
    She looked at me, with those odd, blue, child’s eyes staring out of the pretty, plump, dissipated woman’s face. Then she ducked her head abruptly, and drank down the contents of the glass, shuddered, and set the glass aside. It took her a moment to catch her breath after that massive slug. Well, if she wanted to anesthetize herself at this point, having said almost everything she was supposed to say, I couldn’t really blame her.
    She licked her lips, and got out her final line with difficulty, “I know—I know, you’re going to—to kill me!”
    â€œNot kill, Jean,” I said. “Not kill.”
    As I went to work, I was glad for her sake that she had all that alcohol inside her, but I wished she’d stuck to those corduroy pants. She was still kind of attractive in spite of everything. Nicely dressed as she was, it was kind of like taking an axe to the Mona Lisa.
    I wasn’t halfway through the scientifically brutal roughing-up program Dr. Perry had laid out for me when she died.

4
    It wasn’t the worst moment of my life. After all, I’ve been responsible for the deaths of people I knew and liked: it happens in the business. Although we’d worked for the same outfit, this woman had been a stranger to me. Still, she’d trusted me to know what I was doing, and it’s no fun to find yourself holding a corpse and wondering what the hell went wrong.
    I caught her as she collapsed, and I felt her fight for breath—for life—and fail to make it. It took only a moment. Then she was dead. I was clumsy about easing her to the floor; I got my watch strap tangled in her necklace. Maybe I was just a bit rattled, too. Anyway, suddenly there were artificial pearls all over the rug. Several strands had been broken by the time I’d managed to lay her down and disentangle myself. The damn beads kept slipping off the broken strings by twos and threes, and rolling about in a nasty alive way while she lay among them, absolutely still. Edgar Allen Poe would have thought it was swell.
    I straightened up and took a couple of long breaths and listened. She’d died practically in silence, but it had been a very loud silence, if you know what I mean; and there had been a bit of scuffling before that. It seemed as if somebody outside must have noticed something, but apparently nobody had.
    I took another long breath, and knelt down and made a brief examination. There was nothing fundamentally wrong, that I could see, except that she was dead. She was kind of a mess by this time, of