Lady to Kill by Lester Dent

Author:Lester Dent [Dent, Lester]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4532-9259-4
Publisher: MysteriousPress.com/Open Road
Published: 2012-11-26T22:00:00+00:00

TWELVE

PAUL ROGER COPELAND, THE owner of Transfa Air Industries, threw up his head and listened. He struck, suddenly, an attitude of sharp attention. His hands dropped the papers they had been holding and left the desk to rest, to perch, birdlike, on the shining brown leather armrests of his swivel chair. For the moment he became a distracted man; his thoughts had been wrenched from his desk, his business, his dictation, by a sound in the night. He was all attention. His rather small brown eyes were wide, his long face alert; breathing, under the bamboo-tan terry robe, was for an instant suspended. The fluorescent light from the desk lamp, rich in daylight qualities, accentuated the reddish shading in his hair. His long, narrow feet, encased in rich Morocco slippers, were planted flat on the floor. He was at fifty a handsome man, with good coloring, a fine skin, and being underweight gave him a thin, whiplike quality which he wore well as the nervous tension of a man whose health was not supposed to be too good.

The sound he had heard came again. It was a steamship whistle in the night. Somewhere off Lloyds Neck, in Long Island Sound, he decided, and probably from a New York-bound vessel. He had become an expert on the unimportant matter of craft traveling the part of the sound which his Huntington estate overlooked. These last weeks—more than usually beset by boredom, ennui, dark worries—he had spent much time watching the vessels pass. It was true that craft on the sound were fewer in the wintertime, but the ships that did pass seemed to have more purpose; they were working vessels, tramp steamers, tugs with barges, hard-looking gray Navy and Coast Guard craft; there were very few pleasure yachts this time of the year. He got, watching them, a feeling of purpose which his own life lacked, and, too, a spirit of far adventure, a taste secondhand, which had been denied him. These things threw him back to his youth when, watching the ships from this same vast old mansion, he had pictured himself as a swashbuckling, throat-slitting, dominating corsair, a leader of pirates, a fellow who seized his chances as they came.

Copelands had been pirates long ago. Two brothers, Ezra and Jento Copeland, it was said, had founded the family fortune on the Spanish Main. The strain had cropped out in later Copelands, one could say; in some cases it had paid off, in others it hadn’t. There had always been, people claimed, a wild, unpredictable thread in the family—if true, this had gone underground for two generations. Grandfather Prentice T. Copeland had been a pillar of Wall Street and the church, and Gannet Roger Copeland—Paul Roger was his sole scion—had been, if not a pillar, a solid rock. The family coffers had not shrunk a penny under his guidance, although they had not fattened either. He had handled his son, Paul Roger, with strictness, and the tyranny had made its cut on the boy, a fierce slash of rebellion, discontent, dissatisfaction.

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.