Free Darker Than You Think by Unknown Page A

should trouble neither him nor the law.
    Barbee
didn't like to consider the other alternative. This tall redhead,
smiling with her intoxicating hint of special comradeship through a
foot or so of smoke-hazed air, seemed to offer him more than a
lonely, faintly embittered newspaperman could quite dare dream of,
and he didn't want to knock her gift into the dust. He wanted her to
like him.
    He
didn't want to find a motive; he shrank from trying to discover why
she might have desired Mondrick's death. Yet a score of unsolved
riddles came crowding to haunt him, each casting its sinister shadow
across the girl's gay smile. Who had been Mondrick's "secret
enemy," awaiting the coming of a "Child of Night"?
    Suppose
April Bell were a member of some desperate conspiracy? In this
seething postwar world, when nations and races and hostile
philosophies still battled to survive, when scientists fashioned
another more shocking agency of death each day, it wasn't hard to
picture that.
    Suppose
Mondrick and his party, on their long trip home across the
battlegrounds of Asia, had secured evidence about the identity and
aims of those conspirators—and brought it back in that wooden
box? Taking extreme precautions—fully aware of some danger they
couldn't avoid—they had attempted to broadcast their warning.
But Mondrick, before he could name the menace, had fallen dead.
    April
Bell had killed him—he couldn't quite escape the cold finality
of that. Whether it was freakish accident or premeditated homicide,
the black kitten she had brought to the plane in her snakeskin bag
must have been the fatal instrument. He didn't like the implication,
yet there it was.
    Their
daiquiris came, and her white teeth smiled over the glass. She was
warm and real and near, and he tried desperately to shake off the
hard constraint of his suspicion. After all, he told himself, it was
utterly fantastic. In a world which afforded such efficient
instruments of homicide as knives and cyanide and tommy guns, no
serious murderer would think of depending on the protein dust from
the fur of a black kitten carried across the victim's path. No
efficient modern killer, he assured himself, would place any reliance
on a strangling ribbon knotted around a kitten's throat and a pin
thrust through its tiny heart. That is, unless—
    Barbee
shook his head and raised his glass, with an awkward little smile, to
clink against April Bell's. The longer he let himself brood over
those vague improbabilities surrounding Dr. Mondrick's death, the
less pleasant they appeared. He determined to devote himself entirely
to the more attractive business of an evening with the most
fascinating woman he had ever met.
    What
if she were a witch?
    That
is, he amended the phrase, what if she had wished to bring about
Mondrick's death and expected to accomplish it by garroting little
Fifi? After all, he was fully fed up with his life as it had been.
Eighty hours a week on Preston Troy's dirty yellow rag for a wage
that hardly paid for his rent and meals and whisky. He had been
drinking nearly a fifth of cheap bourbon a day. April Bell, even if
she believed herself a witch, might prove to be a more exciting
escape.
    She
looked at him as their glasses chimed, and her long dark eyes held a
cool, smiling challenge.
    "Well
... Barbee?"
    He
leaned across the tiny octagonal table.
    "To
... our evening!" Her vital nearness took his breath. "Please,
April—I want to know about you—everything. Everywhere
you've been, and everything you've done. Your family and your
friends. What you dream about, and what you like for breakfast."
    Her
red lips curved in a slow feline smile.
    "You
ought to know better, Barbee—a woman's mystery is her charm."
    He
couldn't help noticing again the even white strength of her perfect
teeth. They reminded him of Poe's weird story—something about a
man haunted by a dreadful compulsion to pull his sweetheart's teeth.
He tried to shake off that untimely