Free Winter Kills by Richard Condon

Thursday.”
    “Oboyoboyoboy.”
    “It’s been almost four months.”
    “I know.”
    “Just talking to you is too much. I don’t know how I can be this close and not see you.”
    “Don’t even say it, Nick.”
    “Okay. So long.”
    “I love you, Nick.”
    He hung up in a pink daze. He drifted to the newsstand and bought paperbacks and magazines. Marian arrived with the underwear in a plastic shopping bag. She was a short, thin girl in a miniskirt. If she couldn’t afford to wear a long skirt in London in January, Carswell must be underpaying her.
    “I had a crazy cabbie,” Marian said. “He must be fleeing the police. Aren’t taxis supposed to have speed governors?”
    “How much do we pay you, Marian?”
    “Twenty-three pounds a week. Why? I didn’t miss finding the underwear the first time round. David forgot to tell me.”
    “Give me your notebook.”
    In fullest holograph he wrote a note to Carswell saying that henceforth Marian was to be paid thirty pounds a week. That should annoy the repulsive twit, he thought. Marian stared at the note. “But—why, Mr.Thirkield? I’m really not very good at anything in an office. Honestly, I could have missed your underwear the first time this morning even if David had told me.”
    “You weren’t good at anything in an office because you were underpaid,” Nick said. “Now that you will be paid properly you will improve enormously.”
    “But I don’t want to spend my life improving at this. If I could find a husband I’d be away from you like a shot.”
    “Perfectly all right.”
    “You may not understand it, but you are trying to obligate me, Mr. Thirkield. It’s as though thirty pounds a week were my price. This could change my life. This could make me so obligated that I would stop looking for a husband and turn into an office creep like a girl David Carswell.”
    “What do you want me to do, Marian? I’ll do whatever you say.”
    “That’s all right, Mr. Thirkield.”
    “I’ll take it back. Here, we’ll tear it up.”
    “No,” she said glumly. “That’s all right. It’s my problem now, innit?” She turned away from him and walked toward the exit of the lounge.
    The pink haze had lifted again.

JANUARY 29 AND 30, 1974—PHILADELPHIA
    Nick’s plane touched down at Philadelphia at four thirty-five that afternoon. He checked into the Petroleum Club.
    “You are looking worse than I have ever seen you look, sir,” the reception clerk said genially.
    Nick was very much pleased. “I’ve been on an airplane from Borneo.”
    “Travel is terrible punishment, sir.”
    “Please tell the operator to post Do Not Disturb signs all over the switchboard. That includes my father—I mean, most of all my father.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “And please send a man up to wake me at eight thirty tomorrow morning.”
    He slept for fifteen and a half hours, until the bell captain shook him awake. At nine fifteen he shambled into the baroque Victorian dining room with its magnificent portrait of Edward VII as a young man, by James Richard Blake the immortalist. The room was a womb of the past in deep green and heavy gold. Miles Gander was waiting for him, a thin and melancholy man with a high bald head and heavy black-rimmed glasses. They told each other that each was looking very well indeed. Nick was ravenous. He hadn’t eaten for two days. They ordered at once.
    “Somebody said you ran into a string of dry wells, Miles.”
    “Quite an advertisement for an oil geologist, wasn’t it?”
    “Need any money?”
    Miles shook his head in a melancholy way and went on nibbling at a piece of toast. He was smallish, with a birdlike face and a squamulous nose, as though he were an evolutionary map of reptile-into-bird-into-man.
    “I cannot stand David Carswell any longer, Miles.”
    “He is impossible. But he knows everything.”
    “We are too small an operation to fit in a fellow like that.”
    “But whom would you get?”
    “I thought I’d ask you.”
    “A