Read All The Way for Free Online Page B

past six I’ve been a sort of combination of executive vice-president and full-time wife. Except that I wasn’t married to him.”
    “Why not?”
    “For the tired old reason that he already had a wife.”
    “You don’t look like the type that’d dangle that long.”
    “Shall we drop that part of it for the moment?”
    “Sorry,” I said. “But I still don’t see how you think you’re going to get away with it. What’s Chapman going to be doing all the time you’re looting his trading account?”
    “Nothing,” she said.
    “Why?”
    “He’ll be dead.”
    “How do you know?”
    “Because I’m going to kill him.”
    * * *
    I caught a no-show out of the Miami airport at four-fifteen, and was at Idlewild a little after eight. I took the limousine over to town. It was one of those blustery November nights, not really wet but with scattered shot-charges of rain hurled on a cold north wind. I didn’t have an overcoat. People looked at me as if I were crazy as I came out of the terminal and caught a cab. The small hotel on West 44th Street where I’d stayed once before was all right, but the room faced an airwell and was small and cheerless.
    I sat down on the bed and counted my money. I had three hundred and sixty left. Three hundred, I thought, after I buy a coat. No, I had to have a hat, too. This was New York. I couldn’t go job-hunting along Madison Avenue looking like a refugee from Muscle Beach. It was going to be tough enough as it was; the last reference I could give was two years old. I went up the street to a bar and had a drink, but it only made me feel worse. After a while I went back to the room and tried to read, but it was futile. I kept thinking about seventy-five thousand dollars and blue water and sunlight and a sleek dark head. I threw the magazine on to the floor and lay on the side of the bed staring down at it.
    What did I care what happened to some man who was nothing to me but a name? If I were so concerned over his safety, why didn’t I call him and tell him she was going to kill him? I knew she was, didn’t I?
    That was it. She still was; my walking out on her hadn’t changed anything. The money he had in that account was only a collateral issue as far as she was concerned. I remembered the way she’d lain there in the darkness, rigid and wide-awake and staring, with her hands clenched, and wondered what he’d done to her. Well, I’d never know; but the chances were very good he’d never do it to anybody else.
    So what had I accomplished by running, apart from doing myself out of seventy-five thousand dollars? Well, hell, I’d kept myself from being implicated, hadn’t I? I wasn’t going to kill anybody, and wind up in the death-house.
    But she hadn’t asked me to, had she? All she’d wanted me to do was get that money for her—from a man who would already be dead. Still, I’d be an accessory.
    What had she meant?
    How would I know? I thought. I’d run off before she could tell me.
    The next morning I bought an overcoat and hat and started out. I answered some ads first, without any luck, and then started hitting the agencies blind. My feet got tired. I filled in forms. I left my name and telephone number. The weather was still blustery and cold, with a lowering gray sky like dirty metal. If this were the movies I thought, I’d pass a travel-agency window and there’d be a big sun-drenched picture of a brunette in a bathing suit sitting on the beach in front of a white hotel with the caption: COME TO MIAMI. She was a blonde, as it turned out, and the invitation was: COME TO KINGSTON. A man was landing a marlin off the end of a pier. With a flyrod, as nearly as I could tell. You could see Jamaica was a fisherman’s paradise. I came back to the bar across the street from the hotel around two and had a Scotch while I wondered what she was doing. And how a girl managed to look elegant in a bathing suit. Not lifted-pinkie elegant, but 18th-century elegant. I went up to my