Read Online Murder Has Its Points by Frances and Richard Lockridge - Free Book Online Page A

what—”
    â€œNothing else?”
    Pam went through her mind. She didn’t remember anything else. After Lauren had covered her eyes, after Pam had moved beside her and put a steadying arm around shaking shoulders, Lauren had made only low, wordless sounds, moaning sounds. “I’m sure that’s all,” Pam said. “Then the doctor came and gave you something and—got somebody to be with you for a while. A nurse—somebody.”
    â€œNot a nurse,” Lauren said. “One of the housekeepers. An assistant housekeeper, I think it was. A woman—a very nice woman—named—” She shook her head. “Mason,” she said. “Something like that. It doesn’t matter. I went to sleep quite soon, I think.” She leaned back in the deep chair and closed her eyes. “You’ll think—I don’t know what you’ll think,” she said, and spoke slowly, from a distance, in a voice which no longer, to Pam’s ears, sounded so carefully guarded. “To come to a complete stranger this way. Ask about what I ought to remember myself.”
    â€œIt was a terrible shock,” Pam said. “A terrible thing to happen. I don’t wonder you—”
    â€œYou see,” Lauren said, as if Pam had not spoken. (As I might as well not have, Pam thought. Since I said nothing.) “You see, I—with Anthony gone—there isn’t anybody. I’m—I feel terribly alone. That’s it, really. I—I couldn’t just sit in that awful room. The room I’d—I’d heard it in. I had to—well, just talk, I guess. To somebody. And you—you were kind last night.”
    â€œNothing,” Pam said. “I only—”
    â€œThat was all it was,” Lauren said. “A—just an inpulse.” She leaned forward in the chair and smiled again—smiled again with lips, still did not smile with eyes. “You’ll have to forgive me.”
    â€œOh. As for that? You mean, literally, you haven’t anybody to turn to?”
    â€œLiterally,” Lauren said. She smiled again. “It’s not so terrible,” she said. “I’m a grown woman. Just at the moment, with Anthony gone—I feel—I suppose the word is bereft.”
    It seemed to Pam that, now, manner had returned to the voice; that voice was too carefully considered, words (for all the seeming stumbling over them) most carefully chosen. And Pam found that she did not think that “bereft” was, really, quite the word. Not the word to use of one’s self. Still, of course—
    â€œBut,” Pam said, “you must have friends.”
    Lauren shook her head. She said, “Acquaintances. Anthony is—was—always so busy. And so often away getting material. We had very little—” She ended with a shrug of delicate shoulders.
    And in Pam’s mind, in spite of her best intentions, three words formed—“Oh, come now.”
    â€œThat Mr. Smythe,” Pam said. “Blaine Smythe? I thought he seemed—”
    Lauren said, “Oh,” in a certain way—a way which dismissed Blaine Smythe. “A friend of Anthony’s,” she said. “Not of mine, really. One of the actors in Anthony’s play. Anthony met him at rehearsals, I suppose. I hardly know him.”
    This time Pam almost spoke the same three words. She remembered Lauren and Blaine Smythe sitting on a sofa in the Dumont’s Gold Room, of Smythe leaning toward the slender and lovely (and strangely nervous, uneasy) woman and talking, with what had looked like intent earnestness, to her.
    â€œI’ve bothered you long enough,” Lauren said. “I’m sure you have things to do.”
    â€œNo,” Pam said. “Oh—things. Not really things, though. You know.”
    Lauren Payne did not look as if she did.
    â€œMrs. Payne,” Pam said, “what did you think you might have