Nothing More than Murder Read Free Page A

her! She must have been empty all the way down. She didn’t hog the food. She just sat and ate steadily, like she was going at a big job that needed doing. And she didn’t mind my watching her. She seemed to know that I’d been the same way myself.
    When she’d finished I told her to take her books and go to bed; and she said, “Yes, sir,” and took off.
    It made me a little uncomfortable for anyone to be so obedient, and yet I can’t say I didn’t like it, either. And it wasn’t because I ever thought about telling her to do anything, well, anything bad. I just couldn’t see the gal that way. I couldn’t see her at all, if you know what I mean. If there was ever a woman that you wouldn’t look at twice she was it. Probably she still is.
    Because the more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that I’m seeing something that no one else can. And it took me three months before I could see it.
    It was a Sunday afternoon. Elizabeth had taken her car and gone visiting, and I was lying down. We don’t operate the house on Sunday afternoon. Local sentiment’s against it.
    There was a knock on my door, and I said, “Come in, Carol,” and she came in.
    “I just wanted to show you the new suit Mrs. Wilmot gave me,” she said.
    I sat up. “It looks very nice, Carol.”
    I don’t know which I wanted to do most, laugh or cry.
    She was a little bit cockeyed—maybe I didn’t tell you? Well. And she was more than a little pigeon-toed. The suit wasn’t new. It was a worn-out rag Elizabeth had given her to make over, and she’d botched it from top to bottom. And she had on a pair of Elizabeth’s old shoes that didn’t fit her half as well as mine would.
    The blouse was too tight for her breasts, or her breasts were too big for the blouse, however you want to put it. They were too big for anything but an outsize. A good deep breath and she’d have had to start dodging.
    I felt the tears coming into my eyes, and yet I wanted to laugh, too. She looked like hell. She looked like a sack of bran that couldn’t decide which way it was going to fall.
    And then the curtain rose or however you want to put it, and everything was changed.
    And what I began to think about wasn’t laughing or crying.
    That tiny bit of cockeyedness gave her a cute, mad look, and the way she toed in sort of spread her buttocks and made a little valley under her skirt, and—and it don’t—doesn’t—make sense but there was something about it that made me think of the Twenty-Third Psalm.
    I’d thought she looked awkward and top-heavy, and, hell, I could see now that she didn’t at all. Her breasts weren’t too big. Jesus, her breasts!
    She looked cute-mad and funny-sweet. She looked like she’d started somewhere and been mussed up along the way.
    She was a honey. She was sugar and pie. She was a bitch.
    I said, “Come here, Carol,” and she came there.
    And then I was kissing her like I’d been waiting all my life to do just that, and she was the same way with me.
    I don’t know how long it was before I looked up and saw Elizabeth in the doorway.

4
    I always stop at the Crystal Arms when I’m in the city. They know I pay for what I get, and no questions, and whenever they can do me a favor they don’t hold back.
    There wasn’t anything in my room box but a few complimentary theater tickets. I gave them to the bell captain and took the elevator upstairs. The heat was just being turned on full, and the room was a little chilly. I dragged a chair up to the radiator and sat down with my coat and hat on.
    I wasn’t worried. Not too much. I guess I just had a touch of the blues. I had everything in the world to look forward to, and I had the blues. I got out part of a pint I had in my Gladstone, and sat down again.
    The lights were coming on, blobbing through the misty night haze that hung over the city. Over in the yards a freight gave out with a highball. I took a drink and closed my eyes. I tried to imagine it was fifteen years