Murder is the Pay-Off Read Free Page A

twelve-ninety-eight job you’ve got on, Connie. Nice for a working girl, I mean. I hope Janey can’t find a sitter, if you don’t mind my saying so. Though I don’t suppose that would keep Gus home.” She glanced across the room. “There’s my husband wasting his dough on Aunt Mamie’s slot machine. I’d better grab him quick, before the rumor starts it’s the bank’s money he’s stuffing down the iron maw.”
    As she moved away, Connie was alone for a moment in a dancing pool of firelight, her hand resting idly on the back of the yellow sofa, a witch woman smiling quietly as she watched Martha take her husband’s arm to pull him away from the slot machine. She watched her cousin Dorsey Syms move in, drop one quarter, and move away for somebody else. If you play the slot machine, that’s the way to do it, Connie thought. Take a chance—what was it? 2400 to one on the jack pot, somebody had told her—and not take the second chance that was still 2400 to one. She glanced up the stairs. She could hear her Aunt Mamie’s vigorous, strident voice and see her in her mind’s eye, a champagne glass in one hand, the other firmly pinioning some polite unfortunate, the rector probably, or the judge, vocally bludgeoning him on the decay of manners and morals in Smithville, while her son and her husband put their quarters in the machine. Aunt Mamie’s slot machine, Martha Ferguson had called it. That was because of the printed sign over it. This machine is for your amusement. It pays off 75 per cent to you and 25 per cent to the box in the corner for the League for Civic Improvement. It does not pay for the liquor you drink here. That’s free. It was signed with John Maynard’s vigorous scrawl.
    Connie turned, smiling, to look up the stairs. The League for Civic Improvement was the banner under which John Maynard’s sister Mamie, otherwise Mrs. Nelson Syms, its founder and president, carried on all her whirlwind crusades. Connie could hear her voice now, rising above the clang of the machine—which must be paying off very well tonight, she thought, the way everybody was crowding in to play it, and judging by the crescendo of the laughing chatter around it.
    “… clubs can’t exist in this town without slot machines,” Aunt Mamie was saying, “then the clubs will have to fold, my dear Commodore. Bingo is an entirely different matter. The League made twelve hundred dollars on Bingo last year. I myself won an electric mixer, and a very respectacle woman I know won a washing machine she very badly needed. That is hardly what I call gambling, Commodore.”
    Poor Commodore, Connie thought. She could see him, too, in her mind’s eye, a pleasant little man who was certainly no match for Mrs. Nelson Syms. But the commodore and Aunt Mamie, Aunt Mamie’s son Dorsey Syms, whom she’d just seen at the slot machine, Aunt Mamie’s husband—Uncle Nelly, he was usually called—and her father’s slot machine itself, the gift of Doc Wernitz, there for Amusement and Civic Improvement, occupied only the periphery of Connie Maynard’s active mind and smiling, attentive eye. Janey and Gus Blake occupied the center and core of both as she watched the stairs, waiting for them to come.
    And if they didn’t? If Gus hadn’t heard about the checks, he’d certainly come. If he had heard, then he’d have to come, and make her come, just to show, to keep face in front of all their friends. Unless— Connie dismissed that. If Janey had been going on month after month, getting deeper and deeper into the hole she’d dug, she wasn’t likely to choose tonight to try to crawl out of it, not with Gus so busy trying to get out a Centennial edition of the Smithville Gazette that he was hardly civil to his own staff—Gus who by nature and circumstances was never more than six jumps from the sheriff anyway. She could dismiss that.
    Janey wouldn’t tell him tonight even if Janey knew it herself, and nobody else would. Martha Ferguson,