Murder for the Bride Read Free Page B

Tram’s house with Bill French.”
    “What did she tell you about the scar along her ribs?”
    “She said she was a tomboy when she was little. She was climbing a tree and fell and hit a stub of a broken limb.”
    “The doctor says that scar is somewhere between one and three years old, Bryant. It’s a knife wound. Somebody tried hard, but hit a rib and skidded off.”
    “How do you know it’s a knife wound?”
    “From an X-ray plate I was looking at at eight o’clock this morning. The point of the knife is still in the rib where it broke off.”
    I cupped my hands over my eyes. “It’s all … so crazy!”
    He leaned toward me. His face was suddenly intent. “We’re waiting for word from the State Department, Bryant. She had to have a passport. It had to be in the name she was using—Laura Rentane. I’ve got a hunch there won’t be any passport on record, that she came in on forged papers.”
    “Why do you think that?”
    “She was awful anxious to get married, Bryant. Married to a nice sound local guy with a good reputation. Tossingher out of the country would be ten times as easy if she were single. Can you imagine what kind of an unholy stink you would make if they tried to deport her?”
    “But that alone …”
    “And did she have any good reason for refusing to go to Mexico with you? She might have had trouble getting a tourist card. Maybe whoever built her a passport didn’t build a birth certificate to go with it.”
    “She wanted to get married because she was in love with me!”
    “Because you’re so pretty?” he asked mildly. “We want to find out who she was. Finding out will maybe lead to who killed her and why. So you think of any little personal habits she had that might be recognized by somebody. There was no picture of her in the apartment. You got a picture?”
    I frowned. “No, there wasn’t time. She promised to have one taken and mail it to me, but she didn’t.”
    “Did she write you?”
    I flushed. “Twice.”
    Paris leaned back and put his pudgy fingertips together. “A doll like that not owning a picture of herself. Enough creams and lotions to stock a department store, and no picture of herself. The hair was one of the best dye jobs I’ve ever seen.”
    “It was natural!”
    “With those eyebrows and eyelashes? Don’t be a stupe any more than you can help, Bryant. How about her habits?”
    “I don’t know what sort of thing you mean.”
    “Food, sleep, reading, likes and dislikes. Anything.”
    I flushed again. “It was a honeymoon, and a short one at that. We … ate at crazy hours. She liked to go for walks. She avoided fattening foods. I never saw her read anything. She laughed a lot.”
    “Nothing yet. Keep going.”
    “She could take cat naps at any time of day. She took a lot of baths and showers. Three and four a day. She said she always did that whenever she could. She could speak French and Spanish. She liked movies, but we only went to one. She said she’d see a lot of movies while I wasaway. She adored the color yellow. She wanted to keep up the tan she got on the ship. She used to spend hours on herself. Hair, nails, that sort of thing. She did exercises, twisting and bending and turning. She didn’t like …” I paused as I felt myself go red again.
    “Keep talking. What didn’t she like?”
    “Clothes. She liked to have the rooms warm enough so she could go without clothes. It was sort of … hard to get used to.”
    “None of this is going to help much, Bryant. Can you think of anything she said that sounded funny, that possibly you didn’t understand at the moment and it makes better sense now?”
    “Only one thing,” I said dubiously, “and maybe it’s nothing. She had a nightmare. She was moaning. I woke her up. She said something in a language I couldn’t understand, then switched to English. I asked her about it. She told me it must have been me doing the dreaming. We had a sort of spat about it. It sounded to me like