Read Online Judge Me Not by John D. MacDonald - Free Book Online

taken out the tracks he had improvised. He remembered the bright-red bulbous cheeks of the Snerds. Felice had evidently clawed at one of them, torn a small hole in the rubber.
    It had not been enough for them to kill her. They had to attack her first. He wondered if that had been in the script. Probably. Anything to make him look as evil as possible; anything to lose him the maximum amount of sympathy.
    There was an inevitability about the pictures that unreeled in the back of his mind. Hired witnesses who would testify that Mrs. Carboy had told them she was going to West Canada Lake to see Mr. Teed Morrow. Other hired witnesses who would say that they had seen Morrow’s car in town at such and such an hour last night. Seward’s testimony that Morrow had been drunk. And somebody would find the can containing the money and the watch. That would blow the robbery motive all to hell.
    She had driven to the lake in daylight. Somebody would have recognized her on the road. He brought his feet down onto the floor. The scheme, which had seemed so bright during darkness, now seemed incredibly stupid. A man who could hire others to kill could easily hire others to bear false witness.
    Maybe at this moment they were searching his apartment, finding that photo he had taken of her just two weeks ago. A damn fool trick that had been. In the picture she was standing on the dock, ready to dive, smiling back at him over her shoulder. He’d destroyed her notes, had never written her any. But that picture …
    With sudden nervous energy he got up, told Miss Anderson he’d be back after lunch. Horace Dey, an affable, talkative little man on the Board of Assessors, cornered Teed at the foot of the stairs and Teed had to be rude in order to pry himself free after five nerve-racking minutes. He sped out of the lot and proceeded to hit every traffic light red on the way to Bannock Road. The development was a quiet area of wide grass, small, pleasant brick buildings. The playground was full of preschool toddlers. He pulled up in front of his own doorway.
    He opened the car door and then froze. The car parked directly ahead of his, the car that he had only half-noticed, was Felice’s shabby convertible.
    Teed forced himself to break out of the trance. He walked woodenly to his doorway and unlocked his door. He crossed the small, attractive living room and went into the bedroom. He yanked open the top left bureau drawer, took out the thin stack of photographs. The one of Felice was the third one in the stack. He went through the rest of them. In a shot of the camp the back of her car was visible. The others were all right. He burned the two in the bathroom, dropping them into the toilet when the flame reached his fingers. The laundry bag was hanging on the back of the closet door. He dumped it out, found one handkerchief with a smear of her lipstick on it. A police lab could easily prove through spectroscopic analysis that it was her brand. To burn it would make too much of a stench. With nail scissors, he cut the handkerchief hem in a half-dozen places. He ripped it into strips, ripped the strips into squares and flushed the ragged squares down the toilet after the charred fragments of the pictures.
    What else? Her perfume on his clothes? Not likely. And she had never been in his apartment, only at the camp. He knew that the camp needed a more thorough inspection than he had been able to give it on the previous night.
    And now, the problem of the car. Doubtless the police were searching for it all over the city. Probably Mrs. Kidder had noticed it parked near his doorway. Mrs. Kidder noticed everything. The car had been there at dawn, probably. And Mrs. Kidder would assume that Teed had been in, that he had had a guest, possibly feminine.
    The worst thing he could do would be to attempt to sneak the car away. He knew that. Too many people had seen it. Too many would remember it later. To recognize it officially as Mrs. Carboy’s, or merely to