Read Online The Girl, the Gold Watch and Everything by John D. MacDonald - Free Book Online Page A

rather than break my word to that great man. But I knew you would immediately start currying favor with everybody by telling them everything you know. Believe me, there is no longer any documentation for anything you have told them or will tell them. And you cannot wheedle me into breaking my word, or frighten me into breaking my word. You are a miserable, sycophantic weakling, Mr. Winter, and I would say your uncle overestimated you all your life. Don't bother me again, please."
    And once again the line was dead.
    Twenty minutes later he was pressing the bell for her apartment. When she answered over the communicator and he told her who he was, there was a silence. The lock was not released. He pressed other bells at random. The door buzzed and he pushed it open and went into the tiny lobby. The elevator was in use. He went up two flights of stairs, found her apartment in the rear and beat upon the door with his fist.
    "Go away!" she yelled.
    He kept hammering. A door down the hall opened. A woman stared at him. He gave her a maniac grin and she ducked back into her apartment.
    Finally the door swung open. Wilma Farnham tried, to block the way, but he pushed roughly by her, turned and shut the door.
    "How dare you!"
    "Now there's a great line. It swings, Wilma."
    "You're stinking drunk!"
    "I'm stinking indignant. Now you sit down, shut up and listen." He took her by the shoulders, walked her backward into the couch and let go. She fell back with a gasp of shock and anger.
    "Nothing you can say to me—"
    "Shut up!" He stared at her. She wore a burly, shapeless, terry-cloth robe in a distinctly unpleasant shade of brown. Her brown hair fell to her shoulders. She was not wearing her glasses. Her small face was wrinkled with distaste, and she squinted at him myopically. "What the hell gives you the impression you've got this monopoly on loyalty and virtue and honor, Wilma? What makes you so damn quick to judge everybody else, on no evidence at all? What gives you the right to assume you know the slightest damned thing about me, or how I'd react to anything?"
    "B-but you always just sort of drift with—"
    "Shut up! You did as you were told. That's fine. My congratulations. But it doesn't make you unique. I did as I was told, too. I did not tell them one damn thing."
    She stared at him. "You're trying to trick me somehow."
    "For God's sake, call any of the brass. Ask them."
    She looked at him dubiously. "Not a thing?"
    "Nothing."
    "But those lawyers told me you would tell everything. They said it was the only way you'd get a dime out of the estate."
    "They made just as bad a guess as you did."
    "Did you just say—nothing? Just refuse to talk?"
    "I did better than that. I told them something they couldn't possibly accept—something they couldn't possible believe."
    "What?"
    "I told them I gave it all away."
    Her eyes were suddenly too round for squinting. "But, that's—"
    Suddenly she began to giggle. He would not have thought her capable of any sound so girlish. Then she began to guffaw. He laughed with her. Her hoots and shouts of laughter became wilder, and the tears were running down her small face, and suddenly he realized her laughter had turned into great sobs, great wrenching spasms of grief and pain.
    He went to her, sat with her. She lunged gratefully into his arms, ramming her head into the side of his throat, snorting, snuffling, bellowing, her narrow body making little spasmed leapings with her sobs, and he could make out a few words here and there. "Sorry—so alone—ashamed—didn't mean—"
    He held her and patted her and said, "There, there, there."
    At last she began to quiet down. He became conscious of the fresh clean smell of her hair, and of the soft warmth of her against him, and of a hint of pleasant contour under the dreary robe. She gave a single great hiccup from time to time. Abruptly, she stiffened in his arms, thrust herself away and scrambled to the far end of the couch.
    "Don't come near me!