Mr. Murder Read Free Page A

ravenous; at times his hunger seems almost insatiable.
    While he eats, the waitress stops by twice to ask if the food is prepared well and if he needs anything else. She is not merely attentive but flirting with him.
    Although he is reasonably attractive, his looks don’t rival those of any movie star. Yet women flirt with him more frequently than with other men who are handsomer and better dressed than he. Consisting of Rockport walking shoes, khaki slacks, a dark-green crew-neck sweater, no jewelry, and an inexpensive wristwatch, his wardrobe is unremarkable, unmemorable. Which is the idea. The waitress has no reason to mistake him for a man of means. Yet here she is again, smiling coquettishly.
    Once, in a Miami cocktail lounge where he had picked her up, a blonde with whiskey-colored eyes had assured him that an intriguing aura surrounded him. A compelling magnetism arose, she said, from his preference for silence and from the stony expression that usually occupied his face. “You are,” she’d insisted playfully, “the epitome of the strong silent type. Hell, if you were in a movie with Clint Eastwood and Stallone, there wouldn’t be any dialogue at all!”
    Later he had beaten her to death.
    He had not been angered by anything she’d said or done. In fact, sex with her had been satisfying.
    But he had been in Florida to blow the brains out of a man named Parker Abbotson, and he’d been concerned that the woman might somehow later connect him with the assassination. He hadn’t wanted her to be able to give the police a description of him.
    After wasting her, he had gone to see the latest Spielberg picture, and then a Steve Martin flick.
    He likes movies. Aside from his work, movies are the only life he has. Sometimes it seems his real home is a succession of movie theaters in different cities yet so alike in their shopping-center multiplexity that they might as well be the same dark auditorium.
    Now he pretends to be unaware that the coffee-shop waitress is interested in him. She is pretty enough, but he wouldn’t dare kill an employee of the restaurant in the very motel where he’s staying. He needs to find a woman in a place to which he has no connections.
    He tips precisely fifteen percent because either stinginess or extravagance is a sure way to be remembered.
    After returning briefly to his room for a wool-lined leather jacket suitable to the late-November night, he gets in the rental Ford and drives in steadily widening circles through the surrounding commercial district. He is searching for the kind of establishment in which he will have a chance to find the right woman.

3
    Daddy wasn’t Daddy.
    He had Daddy’s blue eyes, Daddy’s dark brown hair, Daddy’s too-big ears, Daddy’s freckled nose; he was a dead-ringer for the Martin Stillwater pictured on the dust jackets of his books. He sounded just like Daddy when Charlotte and Emily and their mother came home and found him in the kitchen, drinking coffee, because he said, “There’s no use pretending you went shopping at the mall after the movie. I had you followed by a private detective. I know you were at a poker parlor in Gardena, gambling and smoking cigars.” He stood, sat, and moved like Daddy.
    Later, when they went out to Islands for dinner, he even drove like Daddy. Which was too fast, according to Mom. Or simply “the confident, skillful technique of a master motorman” if you saw things Daddy’s way.
    But Charlotte knew something was wrong, and she fretted.
    Oh, he hadn’t been taken over by an alien who crawled out of a big seed pod from outer space or anything so extreme. He wasn’t that different from the Daddy she knew and loved.
    Mostly, the differences were minor. Though usually relaxed and easy-going, he was slightly tense. He held himself stiffly, as if balancing eggs on his head . . . or as if maybe he expected to be hit at any moment by someone, something. He didn’t smile as quickly or as often as usual, and when he