Murder for the Bride Read Free Page A

her?”
    “Bryant, you just take that chip off your shoulder and be good. We want to find out who killed her, and we’ll do it our way.”
    I slumped down in the chair and looked at my knuckles. “All right, Captain. I’d been back from Venezuela about four days. I was working at the Trans-Americas Oil offices in the Jefferson Building. Tram Widdmar, who owns the import-export business, was a friend of mine overseas during the war. Every time I’m in town we usually get together. The fifteenth of May was the hundredth anniversary of the founding of the Sanderson Steamship Lines. They had a big party that night at the Bayton Hotel. Tram had a cocktail party for a big group out at his house ahead of time. I went with Jill Townsend. I met Laura Rentane there. She had come in that morning on the Sanderson
Mobile
from Buenos Aires. Bill French, first officer of the
Mobile
, brought her to the party. I saw her and fell hard.”
    “Why?”
    I glared at him. “Why does anybody fall for a girl? Even the way she looks now, you can tell how pretty she was.”
    “So you ditched the Townsend girl and leeched onto the Rentane woman?”
    “No. A group of us went to dinner together. And then to the Bayton. While I was dancing with Laura we made a date for the next day. She told me she was living at the Bayton. After I got back to my room at the Willow House about three in the morning, I called her up. We met and went for a walk. We walked until dawn. Everything seemed to click. We got married on the eighteenth.”
    “Ever notice the scars on her face?”
    “Yes. The little ones at her temples. She was in an accident once.”
    “I guess you could call age an accident. She put her age on the marriage-certificate application as twenty-four, Bryant. The doctor says thirty-five would be a better guess.”
    “You’re crazy!”
    “You were suckered. Somebody went through all her stuff with a comb, Bryant. There aren’t any personal papers of any description left in that apartment. Nothing. All we’ve had to go on is what she put on that application. She wrote that she was born in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. We got the teletype back a while ago. No record.”
    “That doesn’t mean anything.”
    “We’ll be the judge of that. She had a funny accent. It didn’t come from Williamsport.”
    “She lived abroad most of her life. That’s why. She was as American as you are, Paris.”
    He pulled on his lip. “I was born in Toronto. Now we got another thing. Everything she owned is fairly new. A good bit of it was bought here. Everything else was purchased in Buenos Aires. Everything else.”
    I stood up. “I think you’re wasting your time and mine too, Captain. Maybe it’s too hot for you. Maybe you’re bored. But I don’t get the point in building a big mystery about some maniac who broke into the apartment and killed my wife.”
    “Maniac?” he said. “We happen to know that she has been scared green for the last week. Something scared her. We don’t know what. We’ve got the word of a reliableperson for that. She had a chain put on the door of her apartment. The door wasn’t forced. Whoever did it, she let him in. She knew him. And no thief made that search. Thieves don’t dig around in jars of face cream and take the backs off pictures.”
    I sat down. Zeck said tiredly, “Somebody was after her, son. And she knew it. And they got her. It’s that simple. So we got to know everything so we can find some motive. What do you know about her? Where did she go to school?”
    “A private school in Switzerland,” I said dully. “She never told me the name of it. Her parents died in a French airline crash three years ago. They left her a lot of money. She traveled for the last three years. She said that she hadn’t had a very happy time until she met and married me, and that she didn’t want to talk about the past because it made her sad. I should make out like nothing ever happened to her until she walked into