Read Confidentially Yours for Free Online Page B

thought. “Sunday,” I said. “Unless she changes her mind again.”
    “Fleurelle will be back Saturday.” She was in Scottsdale, Arizona, visiting her sister. “We’d like to have you over for bridge next week.”
    “Sure,” I said. “Thanks, counselor.”
    “Don’t let this thing worry you. Scanlon’ll clear it up eventually; the chances are a thousand to one it wasn’t anybody from Carthage at all. Some enemy he made a long time ago, before he came here—which, incidentally, may have been the reason he was here, in the first place. He was quite a ladies’ man, I understand, and he might have made himself very unpopular with some husband or male relative somewhere.”
    “I suppose so,” I said, and got out. “Good night, George.”
    “Good night.” He swung on around the drive, and the red taillights disappeared in the direction we’d come. He lived in a big house on Clebourne on the east edge of town. I unlocked the front door, and went down the hallway to the living room. She’d left the light on. The suitcase and her purse were gone. I stood for a moment looking at the place where they had lain, feeling sick and empty as I had a mental picture of her grabbing them up and fleeing. It was a hell of a way for something to end. I could see her now, tearing the night apart with the Mercedes, like the ripping of cloth. To where? Back to New Orleans, and then to Nevada? More likely to Miami, I thought; that was where she was from, and Florida was as good a place as any to get a divorce. Well, I’d hear from her, or from her lawyer. I shrugged wearily and went out in the kitchen.
    There was no hope of sleeping, so I filled the percolator, measured out the coffee, and plugged it in. When I went back to the living room I noticed idly that one of her gloves was lying on the sofa where she’d dropped it when I lunged at her. I’d seen it when I came in from the hall, but had paid no attention. The other was lying on the rug in front of the sofa. She’d been too scared and in too big a hurry to remember them when she’d gathered up the suitcase and purse. It was odd, though, that Mulholland hadn’t seen them; he’d thought the suitcase was mine. Curious, I stepped over to the hall doorway where he’d been standing, and looked again. The sofa was Danish teak with pearl-gray cushions, the glove was black, and he would have been looking straight at it. Well, he was too busy admiring himself to notice anything.
    I remembered then what George had said about my behaving as if I were jealous of him. Could people have actually believed that? I disliked him for the posing and arrogant jerk he was, but it went back a long time before the Little Theatre production of Detective Story, and had nothing to do with it. Anyway, there weren’t many love scenes in the play, at least between McLeod and Mary McLeod, the two parts they’d had. I’d objected to her being in it, but only because of the long hours of rehearsals, five nights a week for over a month.
    I paused, frowning…No, hell—she hadn’t liked Mulholland herself; she thought he was a conceited ham, and I could remember her lying in bed laughing about the times he had blown up in his lines.
    My own feeling about him was the result of a number of things, none of them having to do with Frances or the play. A couple of years ago he’d beaten up a sawmill hand and sent him to the hospital for no particular reason except that the boy was drunk and making a nuisance of himself and he, Mulholland, had an audience of admiring young punks in front of the drugstore. Any other officer would merely have arrested him and got him out of sight, but not our hero. I’d witnessed part of it, and with my usual tact I’d chewed him out and threatened to report him to Scanlon, with the result there’d been bad feeling between us ever since. He was a master of the calculated insolence of standing almost in your way along the sidewalk, so you had a choice of taking a half