Read Online You Never Know With Women by James Hadley Chase - Free Book Online

tightly together, her eyes carefully blank, but wide open. She was dressed in white: a strapless gown that held itself up by will-power or suction or something: the kind of gown you’d keep watching in case you missed anything.
    I swung Parker off my shoulder and dumped him on the chesterfield. Neither Gorman nor Veda said anything. The tension in the room was terrific.
    “He threw an ing-bing and I had to slug him,” I explained to nobody in particular and started to dust myself down.
    “Did you get it?” Gorman asked. He didn’t look at Parker.
    “No.”
    I went over to the sideboard, poured myself a drink and sat down in a chair facing them. I knew I shouldn’t have come back to this house. I should have dumped Parker, picked up the compact when things had cooled off and had it all my own way. But playing it safe would have lost me Veda, and I didn’t reckon to lose her if I could help it.
    Gorman didn’t move. The chair arms creaked as his grip tightened. I shot a quick look at Veda. She was relaxed now. A muscle in her cheek twitched. It kept pulling one side of her mouth out of shape.
    I emptied the glass at a swallow. I wanted that drink. As I set down the glass, Parker stirred, groaned and tried to sit up. Nobody looked at him. He might have been at the bottom of the sea for all anyone cared, and that included me.
    “I didn’t get it,” I said to Gorman, “and I’ll tell you why. Right from the start you’ve been too smart and too tricky. You and your pixey hadn’t the guts to get that compact for yourselves. So you put your smart minds together and you thought up an idea to get it so you’d be in the clear, and the sucker you picked on to do the job would be way out on a limb if he failed. It wasn’t a bad idea: a little elaborate, but still, not a bad idea. It might have worked, but it didn’t because you knew all the answers and you kept them to yourself. You picked on me because I was in a jam. You found out the cops were waiting for a chance to throw a hook into me. You found out I was broke, and there wasn’t much I wouldn’t do for solid money.
    Where you slipped up was you didn’t take the trouble to find out just how far I’d go for money. You knew I’d been mixed up in a couple of shady deals, but even at that you were scared to put your cards on the table and tell me you wanted me to steal something from Brett. You thought if it came to a proposition like that I’d buckle at the knees and squeal to the cops. But I wouldn’t have done that, Gorman. Cracking a safe wouldn’t have scared me away from a thousand bucks, but you weren’t smart enough to know it.”
    Veda made a sudden little movement. It could have been a warning gesture or it might have been a nervous reflex. I didn’t know.
    I went right on: “You don’t think I was sucked in by the sleep-walking act and the Cellini dagger, do you? I wasn’t. I knew the compact belonged to Brett, and for some reason or other you wanted it. I wouldn’t have given a damn one way or the other. I wanted your dough: that was all I cared about. But you weren’t smart enough to know it. If you’d told me the dagger case was a bomb I would have known what to do, but you didn’t. And when I found out it was a bomb I got rattled. Everything happened at once. I heard the ticking of the bomb and the guard coming all at the same time. I’d just opened the safe. All I could think of was to get rid of that bomb. I shoved it in the safe, locked the safe and went for the guard as he came in. I saw the compact in the safe, but I didn’t touch it. It was still there when I closed the door of the safe. I could have handled the guard, only the second guard showed up.
    “It looked as if I was in a mess, and then your home-made bomb went off. The safe door was blown off its hinges and it went through those two guards the way a hot knife goes through butter. It wrecked the room too. It was a good bomb, Gorman. Whoever made it can be happy about