Read Online The Withdrawing Room by Charlotte MacLeod - Free Book Online

sport trying to make the best of a lousy deal. She told me she worked all her life for one of those upper-crust department stores that have been driven out of business by inflation and the big chains. They paid peanuts and she had an invalid mother to support, so she never got a chance to put much away. By the time her job folded she was too old to get another, and the Social Security check that was supposed to take care of her declining years doesn’t stretch beyond a ten-by-ten room in a fleabag and a can of sardines once a week.”
    “Then how on earth does she live?”
    “Makes a game of survival. Collects newspapers out of trash cans and reads up on who’s doling out free meals to senior citizens. Then she peddles the papers to a junkman for carfare to get to the grub. She told me she has some very nice clothes she wears when she goes out in company; I’d just happened to catch her when she wasn’t dressed up. And she insisted on paying her own dime for the subway. I was tempted to ask her out to dinner and a show, but I thought I’d better not try to get fresh on such short acquaintance. Miss Smith looks as if she might be a stickler for the proprieties.”
    “Don’t you believe it,” said Sarah. “She’d have taken you on like a shot. She told me she’d got beyond any nonsense about false pride. So have I, that’s why I was so brazen about hurling you into the breach. There simply wasn’t anybody else, and I didn’t dare let her go off alone. I think she’s perfectly sane, too, so when she told me her story I couldn’t take the risk of not believing her.”
    Sarah drank a little of her scotch. “I’m sorry. I thought I’d be able to talk about this easily enough, but it’s—I’m just so sick and tired of horrors!”
    “That’s okay, Mrs. Kelling. Take your time. Maybe I can guess. Putting the newspapers and the subway together, would I be correct in assuming that Miss Smith’s story had something to do with this Mr. Quiffen who boarded with you and fell under the train yesterday?”
    “Have you ever been wrong? Miss Smith’s story is that she and Mr. Quiffen were standing next to each other at the front of the platform. They were more or less exchanging glares because he didn’t like being near someone who—well, you saw her last night—and she didn’t take kindly to being regarded as a walking pestilence. Would you?”
    “Was he that sort?”
    “Oh yes, very much so. I got him foisted on me by some old friends who thought they were doing me a big favor, but I realized he was a mistake from the beginning. If he couldn’t find an excuse to be nasty, he’d go looking for one. If I’d had him on my back for another week or so, I daresay I might have been tempted to do what—what Miss Smith claims she saw somebody else do.”
    “Shove him under the train?”
    “So she says. She insists she distinctly saw two hands wearing brown leather gloves reach out from the crowd and deliberately push him onto the track at the moment the train came out of the tunnel.”
    “Is that all she saw, just the hands?”
    “That and an impression of dark coat sleeves. Of course the train wouldn’t have been able to stop the instant it hit him, and she was right next to it with everyone milling and shoving. She was afraid she’d be pushed under the wheels herself. You know what it’s like in the rush hours. I expect whoever did it just stepped back and got lost in the crowd.”
    “Or turned to the guy behind him and yelled, ‘Quit shoving,’ so that in case anybody else happened to be looking he could claim it wasn’t his fault. It’s unlikely anyone would have paid any attention. People are concentrating on the train, or maybe guarding their handbags and wallets for fear of getting their pockets picked, or trying to keep their bundles and briefcases from getting knocked out of their hands. It’s not a bad way to get rid of somebody if you have the nerve. You’d simply give him the push, let