Read Online Murder is the Pay-Off by Leslie Ford - Free Book Online Page A

detective in the bright-blue suit spoke cautiously without turning as Gus went by him. “Murders burn him up. Gets mean—meaner’n hell. Get the Maynard girl out of here, if I was you.”
    Gus quickened his step, and slowed down deliberately.
    He’d let Connie Maynard off one part of this murder case— the part down in the basement. He knew she was upset anyway. But if experience was what she wanted, she could get the rest of it the way other reporters did and as it came. He grinned without amusement. In front of the cellar door he stopped, listening. Swede Carlson was talking on the phone. “And get hold of Doctor Adams. Tell him it’s important, hear?”
    The phone went back into place. Carlson was talking to someone in the kitchen. The answer quietly disposed of Constance Maynard, for the time being.
    “Outside in her car, Chief. She don’t like kitchens, she says. Don’t know anything about ’em. She’s goin’ to wait for Blake.”
    Carlson came back into the passage. He gave Gus a bleak smile.
    “The lady’s—”
    He stopped as the phone rang. “Hold it, George. I’ll answer that.” Gus heard him say, “Hello,” and a silence, and then Carlson’s voice again, heavily ironic. “Tell Mr. Maynard Miss Maynard and Mr. Blake are both here. Both doin’ nicely. I’ll tell Miss Maynard her father’s worried about her.” He put the phone down and let his breath out slowly. “George, go tell Miss Maynard her father wants her to come home now. Tell her Mr. Blake says he can get along all right from here on without her.”
    As he came back Gus moved aside for him to open the cellar door. “Watch the old blood pressure, Chief,” he said, grinning. “It boils the brains.”
    “Uh-huh,” Swede Carlson said. “Funny thing, when I get blood-mad’s when I start makin’ my big mistakes. I guess that was okay, too. It was a colored boy’s voice. I guess John Maynard is anxious, maybe.” He took his watch out. “And it ain’t late. It’s only ten minutes past twelve. She must ’a been out later ’n this several times in her young life.”
    He opened the cellar door. “Now the rest of ’em are out of the way I want a good look around down here. Comin’? Watch these steps, they’re carryin’ weight with the two of us.”

SIX
    Connie Maynard started violently and whirled around to the man standing in the semidarkness beside her car. She hadn’t heard him come out of the kitchen door or cross the yard or seen him till he spoke her name. She shot her hand up to her mouth, stifling an involuntary gasp. He was a policeman. He was saying, “Miss Maynard.” She stared at him in the dim light with a speechless, somehow extraordinary horror.
    “Miss Maynard!”
    Connie Maynard gripped the wheel tightly. “I—I’m sorry!” she said. For one dazed and dizzy instant she had thought the policeman had come for her. She shook her head and pushed her hair quickly back from her forehead. “I’m sorry. I must have been asleep.” She hadn’t been asleep, unless it was a sort of hypnotic slumber, induced by the darkness all around her, outside and in.
    “Your father called up to see if you were still here,” the officer said. “Chief Carlson said to tell you Mr. Blake could go in with him. They may be quite a while yet. He says you better go on in.”
    “Thanks.” She had to moisten her lips before she could say it casually enough. “Tell Mr. Blake I’ll wait just the same.” She tried to think of something to add to make it seem amusing if determined, but there was nothing. She was still too stunned by the effect his appearance had had, coming just when it did, in the rapidly mounting horror building itself up in her mind.
    Murder—I’d be a murderer, too, She was saying that to herself in the dark recesses of her mind just as he spoke her name, so profoundly absorbed that his abrupt appearance had made her lose the connection between herself waiting for Gus in the substantial reality of the