Read Blue City for Free Online

ripe fruit from a tree. But then she was my stepmother and that would be incestuous. Besides, I hated her guts.
    I said as casually as I could: “Just what happened to J.D.?”
    Her head came erect and her dark emotional eyes looked at me. “He was shot down on the street. Nobody knows who did it. It was a hideous thing. I’m not sure I can talk about it—even yet.” Her voice broke.
    “You must have loved him very much.”
    “I was mad about him,” she said throatily. “He was the man in my life.” She was sitting straight up now. Her white hands on the arms of the chair and her crowning hair made her look like a tragic queen.
    “Wasn’t he a little old for you?”
    She watched me for a moment and decided that I meant nothing by it. “Some people thought so,” she said defiantly, “but I never did. Jerry had the secret of eternal youth.”
    “If not eternal life. Property lasts, though. He left a good deal of property, didn’t he?”
    I hadn’t been feeding her the right lines and she seemed a little confused. “What do you mean? He left me well provided for, of course.”
    “That’s fine. It must be almost as fine for you as if he’d gone on living.”
    She regrouped her forces and fell back to her original lines of defense: “Johnny, you don’t hate me, do you? I hadn’t even the slightest idea what was in his will before he died. I know it’s rough on you.”
    “He didn’t die. He was shot. It was rough on him. Have you an idea who shot him?”
    “How should I know?” She made a face like a little girl, pursing her lips in an artificial rosebud. “He must have had enemies, Johnny. He had so many different business interests.”
    “You think it was assassination for business reasons, then? Who do you have in mind?”
    The question frightened her. Her white face remained composed, but her whole body stiffened. “Why, nobody. I know so little about his business.”
    “Did you post a reward for the murderer?”
    “No, I didn’t. I was advised not to.”
    “Who advised you?”
    “I don’t remember. One of his friends, it must have been. They said the police wanted a chance to work on the case quietly.”
    “They worked quietly, all right. This case has closed up so quietly I feel as if I’ve gone deaf.”
    “I think the police did their best, Johnny. Inspector Hanson worked on it for weeks.”
    “Sewing it up at the seams, probably. Sealing it hermetically so no air would ever get in. Where were you when J.D. was shot, or is that part of the secret archives?”
    I had given her cause for genuine anger, but she was doped by the histrionic emotion she had been feeding me. She covered her face with her hands and said brokenly between them: “How can you make such an utterly horrible insinuation? I was home helping the cook to prepare his dinner—a dinner he never ate.”
    The defensive unreality of her reactions was too much for me. I decided to play along with her and see where it got us: “I didn’t really mean that, you know that. It’s just that I haven’t been able to find out anything, and it’s getting me down.”
    She took her hands away and peered into my face with dry eyes. “I know. It got me down long ago. I’ve had two years of this dreadful uncertainty.”
    “About what, exactly?”
    “About what happened to Jerry. And what might happen to me. I’ve been carrying on his business, you know.”
    “I heard you sold the hotel.”
    “Yes, I had to let it go.” She seemed embarrassed. “But I’m still running the Cathay Club, and the station. That used to be my work, you see. I’ve been in radio for years. Jerry hired me in the first place to look after his radio interests.”
    “What about the slot machines?”
    “I keep out of that side of the business. They’re not really a woman’s field. I had to hire a business agent. He manages the Cathay Club, too.”
    “I suppose that’s Kerch.”
    “Oh, do you know him?”
    “Not yet,” I said.
    “If you’d