Come Die with Me Read Online Free Page B

for something I can’t deliver is very important to me. It all ends there, with my version of integrity, and you can argue until you’re blue in the face without changing that.”
    “Then I won’t argue. Let’s get up and have a glass of milk and watch Levant.”
    She was in one of her agreeable moods. I love her all the time but I love her best then. We drank milk and ate cheese crackers and watched Levant with Isherwood and Huxley, with Nanette Fabray and Slapsie Maxie Rosenbloom, all on a local show, a brilliant phenomenon in a tedious medium.
    We listened to a quarter-hour news program after that and then Jan said, hesitantly, “Would it be wanton of me to suggest a second helping? I’m ready, if you are.”
    And after that we slept.
    In the morning, the sun was hot, the sky cloudless. The Doberman next door was barking at something in his idiotic way and Jan was scrambling eggs. The rain was behind us for a while, the night still a warm memory; my attitude was three hundred percent improved.
    “Get the paper, will you?” she called. “We’ll eat on my little patio.”
    Her little patio was eight feet by ten feet and I had laid the concrete myself. The carrier had thrown her morning Times onto the ice plant that protected the slope from the house next door, and the Doberman went crazy as I clambered up near the wire-mesh fence to get the paper. He had hated me from our first meeting. Jan turns him to abject jelly.
    I snarled at him as he charged the fence and shivered as I watched him slash at the wire. Even most dog lovers don’t like Dobermans.
    As I brought the paper out to the patio, Jan said, “Why do you always tease him? He never barks at me.”
    I didn’t answer. From the front page of the Times a face I had seen only yesterday stared out at me. I read the caption beneath the picture and started to read the story.
    “What’s the matter?” Jan asked. “Why the great interest? Has something important happened?”
    “Tip Malone is dead,” I told her. “He was murdered.” I sat down and handed her the inside sections.
    He had been stabbed with twelve inches of carving knife, and found on the floor of the living room in a Gollago Lake hideaway he and his wife, Gloria (Duster) Malone, had only recently purchased. It was not the season for Gollago Lake and the distraught Gloria Malone had been as puzzled as the police as to what Tip had been doing up there.
    The word “infidelity” was used nowhere in the dignified and factual Times story but the aura of adultery somehow permeated the piece. I wondered what the less sedate afternoon papers would do with the case.
    Malone had been found by a neighbor who had seen lights on at the house and gone over to investigate. According to this man, he had not known the house had been only recently sold; the “for sale” sign had not been removed and he was understandably suspicious because the area had just gone through a siege of teenage looting.
    The last person to see Tip Malone alive, so far as was presently known, was his agent, Harry Adler. Harry had been with him at four o’clock yesterday afternoon.
    From the other end of the redwood table Jan asked, “Do they know who did it? The police, I mean?”
    I shook my head. I handed her the front page and continued to read the carry-over residue of the story. Gollago Lake was in the hills to the West, but still technically within the Los Angeles city limits. It was sparsely inhabited; the neighbor who had found the body had been there to do some spring repairing.
    Jan put the paper down and said smugly, “Now aren’t you glad I gave you that letter to Mr. Duster?”
    I stared at her wonderingly.
    “He’ll want this investigated, won’t he?” she explained. “And you can solicit him before the others do.”
    “Honey,” I said patiently, “private investigators don’t solicit business. It’s unethical.”
    “Nonsense,” she said. “They advertise, don’t they? I’ll bet the aggressive