Suspended Sentences Read Free Page B

didn’t like Charlie.”
    â€œMrs. Cord, I —”
    â€œNever mind. I didn’t like him very much myself. But he was all I had.”
    â€œYou need rest,” I told her. I sat down behind the desk. “Have you seen a doctor?”
    â€œHe gave me a pill. I’ll take it when I go home. Bill, you’re the only one I trust to do this.”
    What a sad thing for her to say, I thought. I hardly knew her. She was the wife — the widow — of an acquaintance who’d been an executive in a neighboring department; I hadn’t known Charlie Cord very well. She was right — I hadn’t liked him, and therefore I’d avoided him when I could. Yet she’d come to me. Hadn’t they any friends?
    She looked down and saw her fist and unclenched it slowly, studying the fingers as if they were unfamiliar objects. She was waiting for me to speak; she almost cringed. I said, “I’m not sure I understand what you’re asking me to do.”
    â€œBill, nobody here cares about Charlie. Good riddance — that’s what they’ll be thinking. You know the gossip of course.”
    â€œGossip?”
    â€œWhy Charlie married me. I’ve never been what you could call a glamour girl. But my father happens to be a director of the company with sixteen percent of the stock. When Charlie married me, he married sixteen percent of Schiefflin Aerospace and married himself into a forty-thousand-a-year job in the sales and marketing division. Charlie made his way well up in the world from the football team of a second-rate state university. That’s what most everybody thinks of Charlie. That’s all they ever think of him.”
    â€œMrs. Cord, you’re upset and that’s understandable, but —”
    She went on, not allowing me to interrupt further. “He wasn’t likeable. He was a boor. He was a hearty backslapper, he was never sincere enough, he told outhouse jokes badly and too loudly. He affected garish jackets and ridiculous cars. He had a fetish for big-game hunting. But he did a good job for this company, Bill. People tend to ignore that — deliberately I’m sure, because no one likes to give credit to a person as obnoxious as Charlie. As Charlie was.” Then her voice cracked. “He made my life miserable. Intolerable. But he was all I had. Can you understand that?”
    â€œSure.” I tried to look reassuring.
    â€œBill, I want you to be the instrument of my revenge.”
    â€œRevenge? Wait a minute now, Mrs. Cord.”
    â€œHe was mine and I was his.”
    â€œBut apparently it was simply an accident.”
    â€œAccident? Maybe. He was shot twice.” She paused as if to challenge me to contradict her. Then she said, “I’ve talked to my father. The company will voucher your expenses. There’s a plane to Denver at half-past eleven.” She stood up. “Find out how he was killed. And why. And who did it.”
    On the plane I reviewed what she’d told me about the death of Charlie Cord, what I’d already known, and what I’d learned from two brief phone calls to Colorado.
    Six days ago Charlie had flown to Denver with his hunting gear, picked up a rental car at Stapleton Airport, and driven into the Rockies to a half-abandoned mining town called Quartz City. In Wild West days it had been a boom town; now it was a center for tourists and hunters.
    Charlie had spent the night in a motel and in the morning by prearrangement he’d been picked up by a professional guide employed by Rocky Mountain Game Safaris, Ltd., a commercial hunting outfit. Charlie and the guide, a man named Sam Mallory, had set out into the mountains in a four-wheel-drive truck with provisions and gear enough for ten days. Four days later Mallory returned to Quartz City in the truck with Charlie Cord’s corpse in the back. Charlie had been dead, by then, about 24 hours.
    According to the sheriff’s