Read Online Murder Comes First by Frances and Richard Lockridge - Free Book Online Page A

after noon Pamela North had thought of nothing to do about it. Mondays were unimportant days, and might as well be rainy. Jerry was always early at his office on Mondays, starting a new week with a new rush and a brisker than normal determination. It always interested Pam North to notice that by Fridays, and sometimes even by Thursdays, the need for prompt arrival, for going at things with a will, apparently had lessened. Possibly, she sometimes thought, authors boiled up on Mondays; just as possibly, only publishers did—or perhaps only Gerald North, who on Mondays was almost entirely North Books, Inc.
    Pam sat in her living room, listening to the faint sound of Martha’s progression through the rest of the apartment, and tried to read the Herald Tribune . She had read first the account of the murder of Mrs. Grace Logan, which seemed accurate except that the name Whitsett was spelled with two “t’s” in the second paragraph and, compensatorily, with four “t’s” in the fifth. From this, Pam had gone on to what seemed like the murder of the world and then, in the hope of consolation, to Walter Lippmann. This was one of the days, she noticed, on which he wrote as if he ought to be President. (He had his vice-presidential days and even, sometimes, his merely senatorial ones.)
    â€œHe ought to be President,” Pam told Martini, who was stretched up Pamela, a furry paw soft against Pamela’s neck. “Either he or, come down to it, Jerry. Would you like to be a presidential cat? Live in the White House?”
    Martini shook the end of her dark brown tail from side to side, and Pam said she probably was right. “Of course,” she added, “before they fixed it up, it ought to have been a good place for mice.” To this, Martini made no comment, beyond faintly purring. She was an introverted purrer, merely vibrating within. Gin purred for the world to hear. Pam, with the arm allowed her by the one they called Cat Major, tried to turn the Herald Tribune inside out to reach the editorial page, upon which she often read the letters to the editor, although rarely the editorial articles. But this caused Martini to move uneasily, and to quit purring and to open reproachful blue eyes, so Pam abandoned it. One should, Pam felt, try to preserve a sense of proportion. She managed, without moving too much, to reach a cigarette and get it lighted. She blew the smoke carefully over the top of Martini’s head. She thought of murder.
    There seemed, in connection with this one, either too little to go on or too much. A missing niece, who probably had nothing to do with it; a grief-stricken young man loosed tragically, almost surgically, from a safe dependence; a biochemist with wide-spaced eyes and open face and a tendency to flush readily; a man who was, for reasons not apparent, following the biochemist from place to place; a slim, decisive, pretty girl named Lynn and her mother, no longer slim and perhaps never decisive, yet in appearance oddly like her daughter. And, of course, Pamela’s three aunts.
    She wondered briefly whether to try to reach the aunts on the telephone, and decided not yet to disturb Martini.
    â€œAfter all,” she told the cat, who now was asleep again, “after all, they’ve gone to Wanamaker’s. It always takes ages.”
    Then she smiled, remembering Aunt Thelma’s remark when, at a few minutes after nine, just after Jerry’s resolute departure, they had talked together on the telephone. Pam had suggested lunch.
    â€œWe’re going to Wanamaker’s,” Aunt Thelma had told her, firmly. “If we can’t go to Florida until tomorrow, we can at least go to Wanamaker’s.” She had then suggested that Pam might like to go along.
    Pam had felt duty closing in a little inexorably, and wriggled free.
    â€œIt’s because it’s twins, I guess,” Pam said. “But I always get lost and never find