Three to Kill Read Free Page B

thighs. At this moment, Béa stood in the middle of the living room wearing sea-green silk day pajamas with flappy elbowlength sleeves, feet bare on the plum-colored carpet beneath the immense flares of the pants. She began to pace up and down the room, trailing wisps of Jicky perfume behind her.
    â€œYou mean you left just like that, without a word to anyone? You didn’t give your name? You don’t know the guy’s name? You didn’t even say where you found him? Do you have any idea what you’re telling me?”
    â€œI don’t know what it was,” said Gerfaut. “All of a sudden I was sick of it. Everything was just pissing me off. It’s a feeling I get now and then.”
    He was sitting on a leather-and-canvas sofa with decorative strapping. He had been there for just a few minutes. He had taken off his jacket and tie and undone his shoelaces. In pants and shirt, his collar open and his shoes loose, he sank back into the couch, a glass of Cutty Sark loaded with ice cubes and drowned in Perrier precariously balanced on his left knee, a Gitane filter in the corner of his mouth, and sweat stains at each armpit. Vaguely perplexed, he had an urge to laugh.
    â€œSick of it?” protested Béa. “Pissed off?”
    â€œLook, I just wanted to get out of there.”
    â€œWhat a dope!”
    â€œThat,” said Gerfaut, “is quite beside the point.”
    â€œAbsolutely not. What must they have thought? You show up with a car-accident victim and then you run off. Tell me this, what are they supposed to think?!”
    â€œHe could explain it himself. Anyway, screw it.”
    â€œWhat if he didn’t know what happened to him? What if he was in shock? Or dead?”
    â€œStop shouting—you’ll wake the kids up.” It was past four in the morning.
    â€œI’m not shouting!”
    â€œAll right, but you don’t have to be so damn rude.”
    â€œYou mean assertive.”
    â€œNo, I mean rude!”
    â€œLook who’s shouting now!”
    Gerfaut picked up his glass and forced himself to drain it slowly without taking a breath, his Gitane filter clasped upright between thumb and right index finger, filter downward on account of a long cylinder of ash that was threatening to fall on the floor, there being no ashtray to hand.
    â€œListen,” he said, when he had finished the drink, “we’ll think it all over tomorrow. I haven’t killed anybody, I did what I had to do, and more than likely we’ll never hear any more about it.”
    â€œFor God’s sake!”
    â€œBéa, please. Tomorrow, okay?”
    His wife seemed about to explode. Or, possibly, to burst out laughing—for, despite appearances, Béa was not what you would call a nag or a ball buster: as a rule she was outgoing and self-assured. After a moment, she turned away in silence and disappeared into the kitchen. The ash of Gerfaut’s Gitane fell onto the carpet. He got up and stamped on it, rubbing, spreading, erasing its traces with his shoe, then went over to the Sanyo stereo and began very quietly playing Shelley Manne with Conte Candoli and Bill Russo. Recrossing the room, he crushed his cigarette out in an alabaster ashtray, which he took back with him to the sofa, then he sat down again and lit another Gitane filter with his Criquet lighter. The quadraphonic speakers softly dispensed soft music. Gerfaut smoked and contemplated the living room, only a portion of whose lighting, the dimmest, was on at present. An elegant penumbra consequently enveloped the armchairs and matching sofa; the coffee table; the off-white plastic cubes bearing a cigarette box, a scarlet plastic lamp in the form of a mushroom, and recent issues of L’Express, Le Nouvel Observateur, Le Monde, Playboy (American edition), L’Écho des Savanes, and other periodicals; the record cabinets containing four or five thousand francs’ worth of classical, opera,