Nothing More than Murder Read Online Free Page A

three hundred pounds and so cross-eyed she scared me stiff the first time I saw her. But an angel couldn’t have been any better.
    But—Well, I’ll tell things the best way I can.
    One night I lost my key ring and couldn’t lock up the show. Elizabeth wasn’t in the house and she carried her keys with her, so I went out to the garage, upstairs, where she was checking some film.
    “You don’t need to do that,” I said. “I can look that over in the morning before we open up.”
    “I’m quite capable of doing it.”
    “I didn’t say you weren’t.”
    “Thank you,” she said. “I’m glad you feel I’m still of some value.”
    “Okay, be stubborn,” I said. I took the keys and started to leave. “Where’s the new cord for that motor?”
    She looked blank.
    I told her I’d bought a new cord and laid it by her breakfast plate that morning. “I thought you’d have sense enough to know what it was for. That cord’s got a short in it.”
    “Why, how gallant of you, Joe!” she said. But she was scared.
    I got the new cord and changed it, and threw the old one in the trash bucket. But the next time I was out there I saw that she’d dug it out and put it on one of the metal shelves.
    And now that I think of it, it might have begun with her mother. The old lady never threw anything away. For months after she died, Elizabeth and I were throwing out balls of string and packages of wrapping-paper and other junk.
    I don’t know. It’s hard to know what to put down and what to leave out.
    There was a lot of stuff on the radio and in the newsreels and newspapers. People getting run over, blown up, drowned, smothered, starved, lynched. Mercy killings, hangings, electrocutions, suicides. People who didn’t want to live. People who deserved killing. People who were better off dead.
    I don’t suppose it was any different from usual, any different from what it always has been and always will be. But coming then, right at that time, it kind of tied in.
    Day after day and night after night, there was a row. With one breath Elizabeth would tell us to get out; with the next she was threatening what she’d do if we tried.
    “What the hell do you want?” I’d yell. “Do you want a divorce?”
    “Be publicly displaced by a frump like that? I think not.”
    “Then I’ll clear out. Carol and I.”
    “What with? And how would I run the show?”
    “We’ll sell the show.”
    “We can’t. We couldn’t get a fraction of its value from an outsider. I’m willing to give you credit, Joe. You’re at least half the business.”
    That was true. A showman would know that. Anyone that was a showman wouldn’t want to buy.
    “I think I get you,” I said. “You want me to give up any claim I’ve got on the business. Then you could peddle out at any old price and still have a nice wad.”
    She raised her eyebrows. “Such language, Joe! What would your parents think?”
    “Goddamn you!”
    “How much, Joe? What will you give me to leave you in undisputed possession of the field?”
    “You know damned well I haven’t any money.”
    “So you haven’t. Mmm.”
    There was more talk. Carol and me talking by ourselves. Elizabeth and me talking. The three of us talking together. Nagging and lashing out, and getting madder and edgier. And the stuff in the newspapers, and the newsreels, and on the radio. There were some Canadian travel folders, and a farmer’s wife over in the next county who stumbled into a tubful of hot lard and was burned unrecognizably. There were the premiums on those insurance policies falling due. Twelve thousand five hundred dollars—double indemnity.
    Then there was Elizabeth saying, “Well, Joe. I’ve finally hit upon a nice round sum.”
    And me, kind of shaking inside because I knew what the sum was, and trying to sound like I was kidding. “Yeah, I suppose you want about twenty-five thousand bucks.”
    There must have been something else, but I can’t think of it now.

6
    O ur house, the