Read 1965 - The Way the Cookie Crumbles for Free Online Page A

to shove his foot down hard on the accelerator, but he was very conscious that an accident or a traffic infringement could foul up the most desperate plan he had ever embarked upon to make big money.
    It was while he was steering the Buick through the heavy traffic of trucks heading for the Florida Keys that Norena said hesitatingly, ‘Mr. Tebbel, is my mother really dangerously hurt?’
    ‘She’s pretty bad, Norena,’ Algir said. ‘You mustn’t worry. There’s nothing either of us can do right now.’
    ‘It was a car, wasn’t it?’
    ‘That’s right. She stepped off the pavement and the driver didn’t have a chance of stopping.’
    ‘Was - was she drunk?’
    Algir stiffened. He glanced quickly at the girl at his side. She was staring through the windshield, her face pale and set.
    ‘Drunk? What do you mean? That’s not a nice thing to say about your mother, Norena.’
    ‘Mummy means more to me than any other person alive,’ the girl said with such fierce passion that Algir winced. ‘I understand her. I know what she has been through. I know she did everything for me. She sacrificed herself for me. I know she drinks. Was she drunk?’
    Algir moved uneasily.
    ‘No,’ he said finally. ‘Now look, Norena, I’ve got some thinking to do. I’m working on a case. You sit quiet, will you? Just don’t worry. I’ll get you to your mother as quickly as I can, alright?’
    ‘Yes. I’m sorry to be a nuisance.’
    Again Algir winced. His big suntanned hands gripped the steering wheel tightly. He didn’t want to know this girl. He wanted her to remain a complete stranger to him as Johnnie Williams had been a complete stranger to him. It had been simple enough for him to walk into Williams’ bedroom and shoot him five times through the heart. He hadn’t known the guy. It was like shooting at a stuffed dummy. If he allowed this girl to talk, to make mental contact with him, how could he bring himself to kill her?
    Even now, those few words she had spoken had upset him. He could feel a film of cold sweat on his face and a sick feeling of horror building up inside him.
    He was through the congested motorway out of Miami now and was on the first broad stretch of highway 4A. Leaning forward, his eyes intent on the road ahead, he sent the big car surging forward.
     
    * * *
     
    The aircraft on the night flight from New York touched down at the Miami airport exactly on schedule. As the passengers crowded into the reception lobby, the hands of the wall clock stood at 07.30 hours.
    Among the passengers was a slimly built girl of seventeen years of age. There was something elfin-like in her attractive, sharp-featured face. She wore a white headscarf, bottle green suede jacket, tight black pants that fastened under her flat-heeled shoes and a white scarf knotted at her throat. Her bra lifted her breasts to a provocative angle, and her neat, small buttocks had a cultivated ducktail swish that caught the eye of every man in the lobby.
    She was very sure of herself. A cigarette drooped from her full red lips, her blue eyes had a flinty hardness, and when the men stared, she stared back with hostile, challenging contempt.
    Ira Marsh, Muriel Marsh Devon’s youngest sister, had been brought up in a Brooklyn slum. Her sister, twenty-two years her senior, had left home and had disappeared out of the lives of the Marsh family before Ira was born.
    Her mother had produced eleven children and Ira was the last of the brood. Four of the boys had been killed in a drunken car crash. Two others were serving life sentences for armed robbery. Four of the girls, including Muriel, had simply walked out of the slum that had served them as a home and hadn’t been seen nor heard of since. If it hadn’t been for Ticky Edris, Ira would never have learned that her eldest sister lived as a prostitute and a drug addict. Not that she would have cared one way or the other. Her sisters and her brothers meant as much to her as her father, a drunken