The Weekend Was Murder Read Online Free Page A

backseat of Fran’s old car, which he calls Yellow Belly, and we headed for the hotel.
    On the way I told him about the haunted room, but he just said, “Didn’t you know that? I knew that,” which was infuriating.
    I asked, “Were you ever inside the room?”
    “No,” he admitted, so it was my turn to be smug.
    “Well, I was,” I said, “and the ghost even talked to me—to Tina and me, that is.”
    Fran took his eyes off the road for a quick glance in my direction. “The ghost talked? What did it say?”
    “Tina had just turned off the lights, when the ghost said, ‘Don’t leave me.’ ”
    Fran laughed so hard, I was glad we were stopped at a red light. “Some ghost,” he finally managed to say. “Was he scared with the lights out?”
    I changed the subject, because there’d be no convincing Fran. I knew what I’d heard, and I remembered onlytoo clearly how scared Tina and I had been. I never wanted to set foot in that haunted room again.
    We parked in the employees’ section at the far end of the lot behind the hotel. I fully intended to emerge as gracefully as possible from the Yellow Belly, but tripped over the door frame and landed on my hands and knees. As Fran helped me up, I thought how glad I was that Tina wasn’t there, and uncomfortably, I wondered if she might be right. Maybe the way I felt about myself
did
have something to do with my short boyfriend and my clumsiness.
    Fran and I walked toward the back door, arriving just behind a middle-aged woman who was in the clutches of a tall, uniformed policewoman on one side and Lamar Boudry on the other. The woman wasn’t dowdy, just sort of dumpy. Her dark-brown hair was pulled back tightly and fastened in a lump. Her eyes and face were pale, and the severe, navy-blue suit she wore did nothing for her.
    Even though their pace was a brisk one, Lamar and the policewoman snapped their heads from one side to the other as they kept a sharp eye on the parking lot. Now and then the woman twisted to throw nervous glances over her shoulder, and when she saw Fran and me coming up behind them she stiffened and gave a little moan.
    Lamar and the policewoman had such a firm grip on her upper arms that she didn’t cause them to miss a step, but they both turned to stare at us.
    “Hotel employees,” I heard Lamar say as they continued on their way.
    “Somebody’s under arrest,” Fran whispered to me.
    “No,” I whispered back. I stopped, letting Lamar and the women with him enter the hotel, so I could fill Fran in. “Do you know about the stolen-securities–money-laundering trial that’s going to start in Houston on Monday?”
    “Sure,” he said. “Doesn’t everybody?”
    I didn’t bother to answer that one. I just repeated what Tina had told me about the sequestered witness who thought her life was in danger. “But don’t tell anybody,” I cautioned.
    We cut through the back hallway, passing the service elevator, where Lamar was waiting with the policewoman and the witness. Just then a door to one of the small conference rooms opened, and Eileen Duffy and a group of people—probably her actors—filed out. I saw the witness nervously cling to the policewoman as she studied each face, then suddenly relax when none of them were recognizable to her. The actors went on their way, following Eileen, and I walked with Fran in the direction of the lobby and the registration desk. That witness was one scared woman, and I felt sorry for her. Maybe when she was sequestered in one of those beautiful suites on the nineteenth floor she’d be able to relax and feel more secure.
    Although it was early afternoon the lobby was filled with people and there were lines at the registration desk, but some of the people in those lines didn’t look like anyone I’d ever seen at the Ridley before. A tall man, who was wearing a deerstalker hat and had that Sherlock Holmes kind of curved pipe in his mouth, wasstaring at the woman in front of him through a