Kill Him Twice (1965) by Richard S. Prather

Author:Richard S. Prather [Prather, Richard S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2014-04-01T04:00:00+00:00

FIFTEEN

Silence.

I could hear her breathing. The big, firm breasts rose and fell, rose and fell, slowing down. Or slowing up. Anyway, slowing.

I pulled up my jaw.

Then she said it quietly and simply.

"He was blackmailing me. Is he really dead?"

"There's no doubt about it." I got out a cigarette, lit it "Blackmailing you?"

"Yes."

"For how long?"

"Six months. It started almost six months ago. I haven't told anybody; I couldn't . . . God, what a relief."

It occurred to me that, if a gal was being blackmailed, and for good reason, that might be enough all by itself to send her into analysis. But there were too many more intriguing angles for me to think about that one.

I said, "How did he get his hooks into you? What did he have on you — or is that none of my business?"

"It's none of your business," she said, but she smiled to take the bite out of the words. "It's — oh, I didn't kill anybody, or steal anything. I didn't commit any — crime. It's just something, a lot of things, I don't want people to know about. I sure wouldn't want it in the papers or made public."

She paused, thinking, and unconsciously reached up and cupped her left breast in a long-fingered, red-tipped hand, and rubbed gently. She didn't actually cup it, since there was quite a lot that wouldn't fit in the cup. But there I was, losing the thread again.

Vivyan's words brought me back to the business at hand. More accurately, the business at foot, the big-footed blackmailer and where he fit into this case. She was saying, "If he's dead — well, you wouldn't blackmail me anyway." She smiled again. "One thing, there was a party up on Crescent Drive one night. Fourteen of us there. It was pretty wild. Somebody said the only thing wrong with nudist camps was they were so fouled up by nature."

"Nature?"

"The outdoors — mosquitoes, sunburn, and so on. You were always stepping on prickly things in the grass. And it was cold as Alaska some nights."

"I'll bet."

"Anyway, we decided to have an indoors nudist camp."

"Fourteen of you?"

"Fourteen. All fourteen — fourteen drunks. You can imagine."

"Yeah, you've got to watch that drinking — "

"That was about a year ago — some people were there you'd know if I mentioned their names, which I won't. We, well, we all went to camp for two or three months, then dissolved the group sort of automatically."

Went to camp, she said. Now whenever I thought of Boy Scouts and other jolly little kiddies "going to camp," Vivyan's words were going to fly into my mind like jaybirds.

"Well, hell," I said, "so you were all naked as — as jaybirds. But even fourteen of you, a whole flock, so what? That is, so what as far as blackmail's concerned. Maybe you were misguided, horribly abandoned, naughty even, but it's not likely you'd be sent to Folsom for twenty years — "

"Of course not. But if it was public knowledge, names and everything, it would be a mess, all right.

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