Hard Case Crime: The Vengeful Virgin Read Free

“Let’s discuss something else. This must be tiresome to you.”
    “No relatives?”
    “What?”
    “Him. Hasn’t he any family of his own? I mean, other than you?”
    She turned and moved to a broad cocktail table beside a long, low pale blue couch. She laid the flashlight on the table. “Nope,” she said. “Nobody but me.” She turned and looked at me, smiling.
    “Suppose I drop around tomorrow morning?” I said. “I’ll bring some stuff along. We can decide what you want. How’s that?”
    “All right. That’s fine.”
    “If we started anything tonight, we’d never get finished.”
    “I suppose you’re right.”
    We walked across the room. I stepped out onto the front porch. I looked back at her through the screen.
    “Good night, Miss Angela.”
    “Good night, Mr. Ruxton.”

Two
    I had that feeling you get. Just a little tight in the chest. Not quite enough air. But so far it was one of those things. I thought again how sometimes I looked too hard at people, trying to figure what made them itch the way they did.
    I drove past the store. Somebody had locked up, and only the night lights were on, with the two TV sets in the show window grinding away; one a Western, the other the fights. I always figured, you get them looking in from outside, maybe one or two will drift inside, and you’re that much closer to their pocketbooks. I left the sets on all night, because maybe somebody would come back in the morning. Then, sometimes I’d stick around till midnight.
    I turned up the alley and drove slowly past the shop. Louis Sneed was at the front bench, working on his hi-fi speaker system, the one he claimed would revolutionize the audio world and cancel out all previous speaker system designs.
    I parked the truck in the parking area, lining it up carefully with the other beside me. One truck was out on call, apparently. Twenty-four hour service, that’s what. All this so you could stay comfortably in debt at the end of every week, with money in your pocket that wasn’t yours, because you had to float it big to make it pay off big someday.
    I looked across at the back of the building, at the shop. Big my foot. It was penny ante.
    Someday, sweetheart.
    I went over to my car, walking quietly. It would be just like Grace to hide on the floor by the back seat. It was okay, she wasn’t there. I got in and drove home.
    There was no sign of Grace anywhere. I drove once around the block before pulling into the apartment garage, but the streets were quiet. She wasn’t hanging around the front of the building, either.
    I went on up and took a shower, then mixed a drink. I kept thinking about this Shirley Angela, and how she looked, and how she’d run off at the mouth.
    Young and tender.
    I went to bed.
    In the middle of the night, the phone kept ringing. I got up. It was after three. It was Grace. She’d been drinking and she was crying. She wanted to make sure I knew she was crying.
    “I’ve got to see you, Jack.”
    “No.”
    “This isn’t fair. It’s awful, what you’re doing. Don’t treat me this way. It isn’t fair. It isn’t fair.”
    “Go sleep it off, Grace.”
    “Please, Jack. Let me come up?”
    I hung up and went back to bed. I was half nuts for morning to come so I could get out to Shirley Angela’s place again.
    Next morning I hung around the store till ten, getting ready. Pete Stallsworth finally helped me load a couple TV sets on the truck; an RCA console, and a Philco table model for hanging over the bed. I worked up some ideas for brackets, and told Pete I was doing something for a good friend and would handle the whole deal myself. I took along a lot of junk—pamphlets, consumers’ reports, pictures, room layouts, good come-on stuff. Why the hell it is, I don’t know, but customers always insist on having a mob of phony literature, all glossed up in technicolor. The set itself doesn’t matter, it’s the folders and pamphlets and crap that really count. Then they hardly look