Nothing More than Murder Read Online Free Page B

show, I mean, is just four doors off of Main Street. On the corner, on our side and fronting on Main, is a dime store. On the opposite corner, cater-cornered from us, is the Farmers’ Bank. Down the street a block is the City Hotel, and next door to it is the bus station and a garage.
    I’m not taking credit for picking the location, but I couldn’t have picked a better one if I’d done it. Any time you can get close to a bank, a hotel, a garage, a bus station, and a dime store—above all, a dime store—you’ve got something.
    The average person might think a Main Street location would be better, but it wouldn’t. It’s too hard to park on Main.
    I sat in the car a minute after I parked, feeling kind of good and proud like I always do when I look at the house. It’s not as big as some city houses, but there’s nothing to come up to it in a town of our size. And it’s my baby. I built it all out of nothing.
    We’ve got a copper-and-glass marquee that you couldn’t duplicate for five grand, although naturally I didn’t pay that. I had the job done by an out-of-town firm, and it just so happened that they couldn’t get the work okayed by our local building inspectors. You know what I mean. So I settled for five hundred, and that, plus a few bucks for the inspectors, was all the marquee cost me.
    The lobby is fifteen feet deep, spreading out fan shape from the double doors, with a marble-and-glass box office in the center. There’s a one-sheet board on each side of the box office, glassed in with gold frame. The lobby walls have a four-foot marble base. The upper half is glass panels for display matter, with mirrors spotted in every three feet.
    There’s a carpet running from each door to the street.
    That carpet would cost fifteen dollars a yard, but I got it for nothing. I was the first showman in this territory to lay a carpet through his lobby. I sold the equipment house on the idea, showed them how it would be opening up a big new market, so they put it in for me. Of course, I let them take a picture of me in front of the house, and I gave them a testimonial and an estimate on the number of miles that had been walked on the carpet without it showing any wear.
    The house doesn’t have a balcony. The ceiling’s too low. I don’t mean we’re cramped. We’re twenty feet at the entrance, which is four feet higher than the average show ceiling. But it’s not high enough for a balcony.
    We’ve only got a ninety-five-foot shot from the projection booth to the screen, and the floor can’t drop much more than an inch to the foot. I’d have to double the pitch for a balcony, and even now it hurts people’s necks to sit in the front row.
    We get along pretty well without a balcony, anyway. I’ve got four rows of seats on tiers at the back of the house, extending up to the projection booth. Not full rows, of course, on account of the entrance and exit and the aisle down the middle from the booth door. It’s more like loges.
    When I put them in my customer liability insurance jumped a hundred dollars a year, because you can’t tell when some boob might fall and break his neck. But the extra seating space is worth it.
     
    Jimmie Nedry, my projectionist, was just making a change-over when I went into the booth. He started the idle projector and put a hand on the sound control. At just the right instant he jerked the string that opens one port and closes the other. He pulled the switch on the first projector, lifted out the reel of film, and put it on the rewind. There wasn’t a break of even a fraction of an instant. You’d have thought the picture all came in one reel.
    “Well, Jimmie,” I said, “how’s it going?”
    He didn’t say anything for a minute, but I knew he was nerving himself up to it. I feel sorry for Jimmie. Any way I can I try to help him out. I’ve got his oldest girl ushering for me, and I use his boys as much as possible in putting out paper.
    “Look, Mr. Wilmot,” he blurted out