Read Online Free Fall in Crimson by John D. MacDonald - Free Book Online

ashes on my head. McGee, your handy neighborhood stud. Always on call. Will provide references. I tried to summon up a smidgin of postcoital depression. But all I could tell about myself, in spite of all introspection, was that I felt content. I felt happy, satisfied, relaxed-with an overlay of a kind of sweet sadness, the feeling you get when you look at a picture of yourself taken with someone long gone on a faraway shore long ago.
    Six
    THE DINING room at Eden Beach had a wing like a small greenhouse, with an opaque roof.
    Broadleafed plants in big cement pots provided the illusion of privacy for each table.
    I arrived for brunch at one thirty, and while I was still examining the menu, a pair of unordered Bloody Marys arrived, complete with celery stalks for stirring. A few moments later the lady herself arrived and slid into the chair across from me. She looked shy and a bit worn. Her lips were puffy and there were bruised patches under her eyes.
    We looked at each other in that moment which has to set the style for the whole relationship. I had guessed that perhaps we would have a bawdy little chat about how we had missed arranging a nooner, and how exhausted the male might be, and how badly lamed the female.
    But from the look in her eyes I knew that was not the way to go, and knew that I would have relished that kind of talk as little as she. So I hoisted the glass. "To us."
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    "To us," she said, and we touched glasses. The drink was spice-hot and delicious.
    "It's going to be kind of difficult and awkward, keeping control of my staff, Travis. I really want us to be very very discreet, very careful. This job does mean an awful lot to me."
    I smiled at her and said, "You are implying, of course, that these fun and games are going to continue."
    She flushed and said, "Don't you want to? I thought we were-"
    "Hey! I was afraid you might have second thoughts. Remember, I was sent into the game as a substitute for the doctor."
    "That's not fair!" she said angrily. I kept smiling. Anger faded. She laughed. "Well, maybe that was the way it started. Okay. Let's say I got lucky."
    "We both got lucky. It has to happen like that sometimes."
    She reached and touched my hand, her eyes glowing, then looked and saw a waitress coming and yanked her hand back.
    "Look," she said in her business voice, "I have to finish this and run. I really do. I am getting some kind of a short count in supplies, and as it isn't my people, it has to be the wholesaler, and I had him hold the next truck. I have to go down there with my bookkeeper and prove to him he's got thieves in his warehouse. I talked to Prescott Mullen this morning-by the way, he looked kind of shrunken and uninteresting-and gave him your name and told him you were checking out how Ellis got killed and said you'd find him sometime today."
    "Thank you."
    "We always put a sprig of mint in the half grapefruit. All the time Prescott was talking to me, Marcie Jean stood there smiling, with a piece of mint leaf stuck on her front tooth."
    "I've thought it over and decided she does have a fat face."
    She patted my hand. "Thank you, dear. You know the old joke about the ideal wife?"
    "Deaf and dumb and owns a liquor store?"
    "Right. Well, you've got an old lady now that runs a hotel, and she's entitled to put dear friends on the cuff, so you better count on coming across the state at pretty regular intervals, hear?"
    She got up, touched a fingertip to my lips, and hurried away.
    I found Dr. Prescott Mullen on the beach, sitting in a sling chair under a big blue and white umbrella. The bride was face down in the shade beside him, a towel over her head, her legs and back pinked by fresh sunburn. Her new rings winked in reflected sunlight. I introduced myself and he told me to pull another chair over, but I sat on my heels, half facing him.
    "I'm just doing a favor for a friend," I told him. "Ron Esterland is suspicious of the timing. If Ellis had outlived his daughter, a lot of money