Read The Gutter and the Grave for Free Online Page B

I’ve got too much talent. Nothing’s going to stop me.”
    “Well, good luck,” I said.
    “Thanks, but I don’t need it. Luck is the one thing that doesn’t play any part in this. All you need is talent and money. With that combination, you make your own breaks. You don’t have to wait for Cole Porter to buy that spool of thread.” She smiled. I smiled with her.
    “You said Dom’s death didn’t upset you very much. How come?”
    Laraine Marsh shrugged. Her body did very pretty things when she shrugged, but she seemed totally unaware of the chain reaction. She lifted her drink and sipped at it, and then wet her lips, or perhaps licked rye from them, it was difficult to tell. I felt good sitting opposite her. A pretty girl may not be like a melody, but she’s certainly like a tonic, and Laraine Marsh was a pretty girl with something else. Maybe it was the drive. Maybe ambition boiled inside her and overflowed from her ears. Whatever it was, this girl bubbled with life. In Actor’s Studio classes they’d have called her tense. Too tense, perhaps. But the tenseness provided a sort of electricity that bounded from the girl in engulfing bursts of brilliance. Sitting opposite her, feeling the life force, the electricity, the whatever the hell you want to call it, I began to like her. Nor was the liking purely intellectual. That life was bubbling inside a girl who was damned close to being beautiful. I’ve never been a person who was easily blinded by thebright lights. Doggedly, I tried my question again.
    “Why weren’t you upset to learn about Dom?”
    “Dom was from Squaresville,” she said, and I guess that summed it up.
    “Didn’t you like him?”
    Again, Laraine shrugged. “You don’t like or dislike a square,” she said. “He just made no impression. He was my sister’s husband. I saw them on holidays sometimes. Period. Do you mean was he the kind of brother-in-law who planted moist kisses on my cheeks and offered fatherly advice, no. He wasn’t. He was, in many ways, a very cold and emotionless person.”
    “But your sister loved him,” I said.
    “Did she?”
    “Didn’t she?”
    The table went silent for a moment. Theatrically, Laraine studied her shot glass and then killed what was left in it. She signaled for the waiter.
    “Didn’t she love him?” I repeated.
    “Matt,” she said, “I stopped analyzing people a long time ago. There isn’t much percentage in it. I’m concerned with Number One right now, and that’s me. I want to be a singer. I’m going to be a singer. I’m going to cut records and sell a million copies of each one. I’m going to make personal appearances, and I’m going to have my own network television show, and eventually I’m going to wind up in the movies where they can give me low-cut gowns designed by men in Paris. Me. Number One. Doris Day started as a singer, you know.”
    “I know.”
    “Okay. So it doesn’t concern me what Christine felt for her husband. That’s her business. If she wants to rant and rave after he’s dead, fine. I’ll go along with it. Why should I deny a widow her pleasure?”
    “You sound as if you feel the grief was an act,” I said.
    “Is that the way I sounded? I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to.”
    “Was it an act?”
    “Judge for yourself. You’re the detective. Christine and Dom haven’t been living together for the past six months.”
    I digested this. The waiter came over to the table, and we ordered another round. Somebody at the back of the bar put a dime into the juke and Elvis Presley began pretending he had the lead in the musical version of
Blackboard Jungle
. Our drinks came. Laraine knocked hers off before you could say “Rumpelstiltskin.” I nursed mine. I’m not a gentleman drinker, but I didn’t want to leave the bar on my face.
    “Why’d they separate?”
    “She kicked him out.”
    “Why?”
    “Did I say Dom was emotionless? He was. Except on one point, perhaps. Christine. I suppose he really