Read Online Wife or Death by Ellery Queen - Free Book Online Page B

vindictive head off.
    Instead, he gulped down the drink and reached for another.
    Denton watched the week go by with growing uneasiness. There was no word from Angel. On Thursday Augie Spile called him up to ask if he had heard from her; when Denton told the chief that he had not, Spile hung up with a grunt.
    On Friday the nightmare began.
    Denton was just locking the Clarion office a few minutes after three when Chief Spile came out of the courthouse across the square and yelled, “Hey!” Denton waited as Spile jiggled his belly up to him. The chief was puffing, and he looked sad and angry.
    â€œGot a few minutes?”
    â€œI usually meet George Guest around this time for coffee, Augie. What’s up?”
    â€œYou’ll have to tell him you won’t be able to make it today. It’s on the way.”
    â€œOn the way?”
    â€œTo the hospital.”
    â€œWhat’s at the hospital?” Denton drew his brows together.
    â€œYou coming?”
    He stared at his old friend. For now it occurred to him that Augie Spile had not once used his name. Something serious had happened. Something … At this point Denton shut his mind down tight.
    He stopped in at the hardware store to tell a staring George Guest that coffee was out for the day, and accompanied the police chief in total silence the one long block to the county hospital.
    District Attorney Crosby was waiting for them in the lobby. He ignored Denton. “You tell him anything, Chief?”
    â€œNope.”
    â€œTell me what?” asked Denton slowly.
    The district attorney turned to him then.
    Denton had not laid eyes on the man since the night of the Wyatts’ party. His first thought was that Crosby was still brooding over the crack on the jaw; the yellow-green bruise was still visible. But then he changed his mind. Crosby’s fleshy face wore a queerly withered look, as if someone had held it forcibly down in a pan of astringent; the lines at the corners of his rather feminine mouth might have been slashed there by a scalpel.
    It was not sullen resentment at all. It was grief.
    Grief?
    Crosby cleared his throat—almost, Denton thought wildly, as if he were preparing to approach the bench. “We think,” he said in an acid-bitter voice, “we’ve found your wife.”
    A little gavel began to tap on Denton’s temple. “Found her? You think ? What is this? What do you mean?”
    And now District Attorney Ralph Crosby’s lips flattened with a sort of enjoyment, and his nostrils flared brutally. “It’s hard to tell, Denton,” he snarled. “The animals have been at her. She’s been lying out in the woods a week or more.”

9
    Denton’s stomach flipped over and something ice-cold touched the bone at the back of his neck and flashed down his spine. For the first time in his life he knew what the word “shudder” meant.
    He shut his eyes, tight.
    I’ve known this since Augie’s visit, he thought. I didn’t know I knew it, but I did … He realized now that a kind of portent had been creeping up on him, a sign of inevitability. Of death. Angel’s death.
    He had stopped loving her long ago, if indeed he had ever loved her at all. In the beginning her body, maybe; no, her body surely. But nothing else. There had been nothing else to love. If anything, he had pitied her. Certainly he had never wished her any harm. At her worst she had been too much of a child, too guiltless in her lusts, to arouse hatred.
    Then why had this hit him so hard? Was it her beauty—a beauty unrelated to what she did, to herself, to him, to his feelings about her? That was probably it, Denton told himself dully. It made him ill to think of that face, that body being mutilated and corrupted. Just to imagine what it must look like …
    â€œThat was a pretty nasty way to break it to him, Ralph,” the police chief was growling. “Jim, you all