Murder is the Pay-Off Read Free Page B

maybe— if her husband had told her. Martha might blurt it out for his own good.
    Connie looked across the room. The Fergusons were standing at the bar talking to the colored boy behind it, Jim Ferguson’s arm around his wife’s shoulders. Connie shook her head. Martha talked a lot, but not when Jim told her, to shut up. As president of the town’s leading bank, this was one time he’d be sure to tell her. No, Gus could go on a long time without knowing anything about it. It was one of the things about a town like Smithville. The Conspiracy of Silence, John Maynard called it. Like Aunt Mamie not knowing she used money from a slot machine, and the people who came and lived there for years not knowing that Judge Dikes hovered so solicitously around his sister because she’d pick up any small movable object if he didn’t, and not knowing, for instance, that another of the guests upstairs had shot his wife and been acquitted without the jury’s so much as leaving the box to make up their mind.
    “Waiting for somebody?”
    Connie started. She hadn’t noticed her cousin Dorsey Syms move around behind the masonry piers to join her. He was smiling, the Maynard smile. There was very little Syms in Aunt Mamie’s son. He had the Maynard height, the Maynard confidence, the black hair, brown eyes, straight nose, and slightly cleft chin. And a good deal of his Uncle John Maynard’s charm. The Syms family had nothing much to distinguish them except an ancestor who’d conducted the Siege of Smithville against Cornwallis and whom Aunt Mamie had brevetted from ensign to colonel. Except Nelson Syms, of course. He had Aunt Mamie, and the job her brother John Maynard had got him in the County Treasurer’s office. And his son Dorsey Syms, whose most attractive quality was his obvious fondness for his father. Neither of them could have survived Aunt Mamie if they hadn’t formed a “league” of their own, Connie thought, hearing the voluble, determined voice beating on upstairs.
    She smiled at her cousin. “Just wondering whether we ought to start feeding people.”
    “Not before Gus and Janey get here, surely,” Dorsey Syms said. “I suppose they’re coming?”
    “I suppose so.”
    Not a ripple showed on the clear surface of her casual unconcern, but her pulse had quickened. He works in the bank. He knows. He must know all about it. He’s trying to find out if I know, too. He’s supposed to have been crazy about Janey once. She glanced around the playroom again. How many people there did know? Jim Ferguson certainly, and probably Martha. Orvie Rogers probably. Dorsey Syms, herself, her father upstairs—who else? There were at least thirty people there by now. If Janey and Gus didn’t come pretty soon, somebody would say something.
    “I hear Doc Wernitz is leaving town,” Dorsey said. “Scotch, please.” He took a highball off the tray the boy was passing again. “Does he take that little gadget of yours over there along with him?”
    “You mean the slot machine?”
    She wasn’t smiling any longer. “That’s Dad’s, not mine.” Her level gaze met his and held it. “And it was a gift, not a loan. Doc Wernitz hasn’t any strings on Dad, or vice versa, if that’s what you mean. Any more than he has on—”
    She broke off and flashed around. The quick light in her cousin’s eye and the delighted shout from everybody else in the playroom could only mean one of two things. A jack pot, or—
    “Janey! Hi, Janey!”
    A jack pot, Connie Maynard thought, or Janey.
    “Hi, Janey!” Everybody was shouting it, and Janey was there on the stairs. Gus was behind her, and Connie heard somebody say, “Hello, there, Gus, how’s the boy?” But it was Janey they were glad to see and always saw first, Janey, who always just stopped and stood there, looking as if she’d just been scrubbed and had her hair ribbons tied, always surprised and eternally delighted that they noticed she’d come and really seemed to want her