The Price of Murder Read Free Page A

doesn’t sound right, Mr. Keefler. I had a football scholarship. Danny used to send me money. Nick used to send some too, a twenty or a fifty, with a note telling me to live it up. I guess I was … a hobby with Nick. I played good ball the first two years. Then after my eyes went bad and they shifted me to guard, my leg went bad.”
    “You say I put things the wrong way. So tell me what happened to your mother. Tell it your way.”
    “Is it important?”
    “Come on, boy. Put it in your words. You’ve got the education.”
    “It … happened in my sophomore year. In December, Danny had moved her out of the Sink the previous spring. She … went back to the Sink to look up old friends. It was a cold night. She started drinking and she passed out in an alley, and by the time she was found it was too late. I came back for the funeral.”
    Keefler nodded. “That’s just about the way it looks on the records, kid. And then the next year Nick got too big for his pants and tried to fight the syndicate so they cuthim down and made it look like suicide, and a man named Kennedy came in and took over the boss job. He figured Danny had been too loyal to Nick, so Danny took his second fall.”
    “For something he didn’t do.”
    “He just got elected for it. Think of the things he did do, kid.” Keefler dropped his cigarette on the porch floor and rubbed it out with the sole of a black shoe. “Both the Bronson boys would have made out better if Nick had been smart enough to stay in the saddle.”
    “I don’t see how it made any difference to me.”
    “Oh, sure. He wanted to help you get out of the Sink. Until you got a college education.”
    “It hurt Danny. I’ll admit that. But when I graduated, I wasn’t a football bum looking for a job with Nick or anybody like him. I graduated with good marks.”
    “I know, I know,” Keefler said wearily. “And you got yourself wounded and decorated in Korea and you came back and went to Columbia Graduate School on the G.I. Bill. I’m talking about what you
would
have done.”
    But Lee knew he had done what seemed inevitable. After hospital time in Japan, he was sent back on a hospital ship, was completely ambulatory by the time they docked at San Francisco. His request for discharge at Dix was granted. He enrolled in Columbia Graduate School, carried the heaviest work load they would give him, and earned his Master’s.
    By then he had destroyed the short stories and the notes for the novel. He had over seventy pages done on an entirely different novel. He had three hundred dollars. The placement agency had come up with the instructor-ship at Brookton Junior College. He went out for an interview and signed a contract. During that summer he worked on a road job to get back in shape. After the first week of exhaustion he began to adjust to the labor, and began work again on the book. The construction company was working on a stretch of new divided highway in southern Michigan where rooms were hard to find. He found a room in the farmhouse of a couple named Detterich. They had three young sons on the farm and an older daughter working in an insurance office in Battle Creek.The daughter came home to the farm for her vacation—the last two weeks of August. Her name was Lucille. She was the loveliest thing he had ever seen.
    The following December, after half a dozen trips in the ancient Plymouth he had purchased in order to be able to drive down to Battle Creek, and after he had been with his new job long enough to know that he liked it and could do it well, and after he had received the advance on his book of two hundred and fifty dollars, he married her in the parlor of the Detterich farmhouse on the second day of the Christmas vacation. They honeymooned in New Orleans, an unexpected honeymoon made possible by Danny’s wedding gift of five crackling new hundred dollar bills, wrapped in a sheet of hotel stationery on which he had scrawled,
Have a ball, kids.
Danny had been