River girl by Charles Williams

Author:Charles Williams [Charles Williams]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Policier
ISBN: 9781596541702
Published: 2005-03-15T07:00:00+00:00

Fifteen

It took only a couple of minutes to find it now. With a grunt of satisfaction, I jerked it from the file and put it on the desk, and stood looking down at the picture of Lewis Farrell, alias Roger Shevlin, wanted for murder and escape.

The picture had been made a long time ago, apparently in 1940, and Lorraine had been right in saying he was a handsome man, but the identity was unmistakable. Looking at it now, I could see why I had still noticed the resemblance when I saw him that day on the lake. It was the deep-set, rather brooding eyes and the well-formed bone structure of the face, which the lines of the years and that grayish stubble hadn’t been able to hide.

I read it hurriedly. He had been tried and convicted of killing his wife in 1939. There was no information about the crime itself, or the trial, but apparently it hadn’t been first-degree murder, for he had drawn a life sentence instead of death. He began serving time in the state penitentiary in 1940, was transferred to a farm as a model prisoner in 1943, and had escaped the same year. So far, so good, I thought, and very good.

The picture stared up at me. Year after year of running, I thought, and terror, and nights of looking up at the ceiling in the dark while he wondered who had seen him during the day. He’d had years of this and then wound up lying face down in his own blood in a backwoods cabin, and I had been the one who had killed him, so now I had bought my own ticket on the merry-go-round. I straightened up and ran a hand across my face. There was no use getting morbid about it now. I stuck the notice back in the file.

I closed the office and went back out into the square. It all depended now on what I found out from Buford. If he said that a lawyer or someone else had visited Waites after his arrest, we could be pretty sure they believed we didn’t know what had really happened down there, or what was behind it, and that they were taking pains to keep us in the dark. Bernice was gone, and they wouldn’t know we had the letter, and...I stopped. The letter! My God, why hadn’t I thought of it sooner? If Waites hadn’t already told them that he’d lost it down there, he would sooner or later, and they’d go look for it.

I crossed to the car as fast as I could walk, backed out of the parking place, and shot down the street toward the hotel. Parking in the same place I had before, I took a look up and down the street. The hotel itself was still dark and no one was in sight.

I went up the steps. Slipping softly into the lobby, I walked down the hall by feel until I came to the door of the room.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.