Read Enough! (A Travesty and Ordo) for Free Online Page A

intuitive and emotional. Bray, in character, now said,
“On the other hand, he could have come in afterward, found the body, and
figured he ought to keep himself out of it.”
    “I still think it’s the boy friend,”
Staples said.
    “Except for the glass,” Bray told
him. “If he lived here, wouldn’t he have known about that?”
    Something trembled in my stomach. Trying to
sound no more than ordinarily curious, I said, “Glass?”
    This time Staples got to answer the question.
“There was one glass in the living room here,” he said, “with a
partly-consumed drink in it. But in the kitchen cabinet was another glass that
had been washed and put away. So the killer had a drink with her, and then
after she was dead he washed his glass.”
    “Fantastic,” I said. “How did
you know all that? If he washed the glass, how did you find out?”
    “He put it in the cabinet right side up.
Mrs. Penney stored her glasses upside down, so that one glass was put away by
somebody else.”
    “By God,” I said, “real-life
detectives are just like the movies.”
    Staples grinned like an Irish setter. “We
get lucky sometimes.”
    “No, I can see it’s a special kind of
talent,” I insisted, giving him a return overdose of praise while at the
same time cursing myself for that stupidity about the glass. Of course she kept
her damn glasses upside down, I knew that, but I must have been more rattled
than I’d thought. The shelf is high, and the damn glasses look the same right
side up or upside down.
    Bray said to his partner, “If the guy was
living here, he’d know which way the glasses went.”
    “Not if he got rattled,” Staples
said. “Besides, I don’t think he actually lived here, I think he just
stayed overnight sometimes.”
    I said, “That’s the significance of the
socks?”
    Staples grinned again; by golly, this was
another chance to dazzle me with his sleuthing. “They’re more significant
than that,” he said, and when he went on he addressed himself equally to
his partner and to me. “These socks were the only male clothing in the
bedroom. Now, the razor and stuff in the bathroom don’t mean much, they could
even belong to the victim herself. But these socks mean a man, and one that
stayed here often enough to keep some extra clothing around. And you see what
else they mean?”
    I had to admit I didn’t, but Bray already
knew. “He cleaned his stuff out,” he said.
    Staples pointed an approving finger at him. “Right! He left the socks because there’s no way to
trace anybody from socks like these. But he took everything else because maybe
they could be traced. Laundry marks, initials, whatever.” Turning his
beaming face toward me, he said, “Now, you see what that means. That means
guilty knowledge.”
    “Ah,” I said.
    Bray, the cautious one, said, “I agree
with you, Fred, up to a point. There is a boy friend and he did clear his stuff
out after the victim was killed. But I still think there’s a good chance he
came in after she was dead, realized he could be in a lot of trouble, and tried
to cover his tracks.”
    “Maybe so,” Staples said.
“Maybe there’s two guys out there in front of us,
but I still think there’s only one.”
    “And there’s something else,” Bray
told him. He then had me repeat my story about the mysterious man across the
street, after which he said, “So he could be the killer, too.”
    I said, “Excuse me, I’m not trying to
play detective with you, but she didn’t know who that man was, so she wouldn’t
sit down and have a drink with him, would she?”
    Staples now did his finger-pointing in my
direction, saying, “Very good, Mr. Thorpe, very good. Of course it’s
possible, the guy could have come up and said he had a message from her husband
or whatever, she asks him in for a drink and he kills her. That’s possible, but
it isn’t very likely.”
    I said, “Or maybe the killer did the
thing with the glass to throw you off, make you think