Nothing More than Murder Read Online Free

him.”
    “Yeah, but it didn’t look so good, particularly with me forgetting to buy paper.”
    “Well.”
    “It made it look like I didn’t intend to play the picture. I almost might as well have told him I wanted that sixteen-reeler because of its length. Because it would make twice as hot a fire as—”
    It wasn’t true. The slip couldn’t have meant anything like that to Hap, and Carol knew it. She saw I was just trying to divert her from Elizabeth.
    We’d turned off all the lights except the one in the bathroom, and I was holding her on my lap in a big chair in front of the window. She began to breathe very deeply. I turned her face away from my chest, and I saw that she was crying.
    “Don’t do that,” I said. “Please, Carol.”
    “Y-You’re in love with her,” she said. “She treats you like a dog, an’—and you go right on loving her.”
    “The hell I do!”
    “Y-You do. And it’s not fair! I’d do anything in the world for you, anything, Joe! And she hates you. And—a-and it doesn’t make any difference. Y-You k-keep right on—”
    “But, damnit, I don’t!”
    “You do, too!”
    It would have gone on all night, but I didn’t let it.
    As the guy said on his wedding night, it was no time for talking.

5
    I t was the next afternoon, and I was feeling pretty low.
    Coming out of the city I’d passed a guy walking, a tired shabby-looking guy that looked like he needed a good night’s sleep and a square meal; and I started to stop for him. And then, just when he was about to catch up with me, I stepped on the gas and drove off.
    It was a mean thing to do and I hadn’t intended doing it. What I meant to do was carry him down the road as far as he was going, and give him some food and change. Instead of that, I’d torn off when he almost had his hand on the door.
    All of a sudden it came over me why I’d had so many blue spells lately. It was because I felt like I didn’t amount to much anymore. It was because I didn’t feel that I was as good as other people—that I shouldn’t put myself with people who wouldn’t do what I was doing.
    Subconsciously, I’d been afraid that hitchhiker might sense something, like maybe he’d pass up the car or ask to be let out after he got in. Subconsciously, I’d felt like he ought to.
    I wondered again, like I had a thousand times, how the hell it all started.
    One time, years ago, I sat in on one of Elizabeth’s literary club meetings when they were discussing some lady poet. This poetry, this stuff this lady wrote, wasn’t like real poetry. It wasn’t like anything, in fact. It was just a lot of words strung together about God knows what all, and they’d say the same things over and over.
    Well, though, it seemed like the stuff did make sense, once you understood what this lady was trying to do. She was writing about everything all at one time. She was writing about one thing, of course, more than the others, but she was throwing in everything that was connected with it; and she didn’t pretend to know what was most important. She just laid it out for you and you took your choice.
    I’ll have to do the same thing.
    Offhand, you’d say it began with Elizabeth catching Carol and me together that Sunday afternoon. But if there was a murder every time a husband or wife got caught like that there wouldn’t be any people left. So—
    It might have begun with the time I closed up Bower’s house, and moved part of his equipment up to our garage. Or the time, right after we were married, when Elizabeth and I each took out twelve thousand five hundred dollars’ insurance on the other. Or the time when I was delivering film for the exchanges, and it was raining, and I drove her up to her house in the company truck.
    It may have started with Carol’s old man being pinched for stealing hogs. Or the pushing around I took in reform school. Or at the orphanage—although it wasn’t so bad there. The head matron was an old Irishwoman, weighing about