Psycho Read Free Page B

one of the worst—a big operator, loaded with money from oil leases. He didn't have to turn a hand, but he was always dabbling in real estate, sniffing the scent of somebody's fear or want, bidding low and selling high, alert to every possibility of squeezing out an extra dollar in rentals or income.
    He thought nothing of laying down forty thousand dollars in cash to buy his daughter a home for a wedding present.
    Any more than he thought anything about laying down a hundred-dollar bill on Mary Crane's desk one afternoon about six months ago, and suggesting she take a "little trip" with him down to Dallas for the weekend.
    It had all been done so quickly, and with such a bland and casual smirk, that she didn't have time to get angry. Then Mr. Lowery came in, and the matter ended. She'd never told Cassidy off, in public or in private, and he never repeated the offer. But she didn't forget. She couldn't forget the wet-lipped smile on his fat old face.
    And she never forgot that this world belonged to the Tommy Cassidy's. They owned the property and they set the prices. Forty thousand to a daughter for a wedding gift; a hundred dollars tossed carelessly on a desk for three days' rental privileges of the body of Mary Crane.
    So I took the forty thousand dollars —
    That's the way the old gag went, but this hadn't been a gag. She did take the money, and subconsciously she must have been daydreaming about just such an opportunity for a long, long time. Because now everything seemed to fall into place, as though part of a preconceived plan.
    It was Friday afternoon; the banks would be closed tomorrow and that meant Lowery wouldn't get around to checking on her activities until Monday, when she didn't show up at the office.
    Better still, Lila had departed, early in the morning, for Dallas—she did all the buying for the record shop now. And she wouldn't be back until Monday either.
    Mary drove right to the apartment and packed; not everything, just her best clothes in the suitcase and the small overnight bag. She and Lila had three hundred and sixty dollars hidden away in an empty cold-cream jar, but she didn't touch that. Lila would need it when she had to keep up the apartment alone. Mary wished that she could write her sister a note of some kind, but she didn't dare. It would be hard for Lila in the days ahead; still, there was no help for it. Maybe something could be worked out later on.
    Mary left the apartment around seven; an hour later she halted on the outskirts of a suburb and ate supper, then drove in under an OK USED CAR sign and traded her sedan for a coup. She lost money on the transaction; lost still more early the next morning when she repeated the performance in a town four hundred miles north. Around noon, when she traded again, she found herself in possession of thirty dollars in cash and a battered old heap with a crumpled left front fender, but she was not displeased. The important thing was to make a number of fast switches, cover her trail, and wind up with a junker that would take her as far as Fairvale. Once there she could drive further north, maybe as far as Springfield, and sell the last car under her name; how would the authorities trace down the whereabouts of a Mrs. Sam Loomis, living in a town a hundred miles from there?
    Because she intended to become Mrs. Sam Loomis, and quickly. She'd walk in on Sam with this story about coming into the inheritance. Not forty thousand dollars—that would be too large a sum, and might require too 'much explanation—but maybe she'd say it was fifteen. And she'd tell him Lila had received an equal amount, quit her job abruptly, and gone off to Europe. That would explain why there was no sense inviting her to the wedding.
    Maybe Sam would balk about taking the money, and certainly there'd be a lot of awkward questions to answer, but she'd get around him. She'd have to. They'd be married at once; that was the important thing. She'd have his name then, Mrs. Sam