Free 13 French Street by Gil Brewer Page B

Faint wind fingered the gray dress. The fly did not move.
    Verne rose, stepped around the body, started toward the front door of the house. “Phone,” he said. “Phone.” He looked very forlorn in his bare feet and his haggard hair and his wrinkled white pajamas.
    When I glanced down again the fly was gone.
    I closed my eyes. The red tail light of a taxi winked around the corner.
    “You killed her.”
    She watched me.
    “You killed her. You pushed her out of that window.”
    She held her hair bunched at the back of her neck and watched me, unblinking, serene. She had on a soft black dress now, and a cloud-thin white scarf was tied around her throat. “Don’t be silly, Alex,” she said. “You don’t know what you’re saying.”
    She was denying it. “You saw your chance,” I said. “A natural. You took that chance.”
    We talked across the corpse. The old woman’s body was between us. I was numb inside; rigid, like a plank, like a sheet of cast iron. Then somebody struck the iron with a maul. I stepped over the body toward Petra.
    She whirled, pushed through some hedges, and retreated around the side of the house. I followed her, caught up, flung her against the side of the house.
    “You’re a bitch!” I said. “A murderous bitch!”
    I held her back against the red brick side of the house. Her feet were in a flower bed, but this was fall, and things were dying. Flowers crisped beneath her feet.
    “He mustn’t catch us out here, Alex. Not like this.”
    I tightened my grip on her arms. She didn’t wince. That old bold quality was there in her eyes and the turn of her lips, and it seemed then that nothing could destroy it.
    “I’m going to tell him,” I said. “I’ll have him phone the police instead of just the doctor. What good will a doctor do? She’s dead, and you killed her.”
    Her tongue tipped her lips and for an instant her eyes dropped. But then she looked at me more strongly than before. “No, you won’t, Alex. You want me too much.”
    “A proud bitch, too.”
    “Yes, Alex. And not only that. If you started anything by telling such a story, what would they think? What would the police think?”
    “You black beautiful bitch, you!”
    “You love it!” She brought her hands up to my arms. I flung them down. She said, “You’re as implicated as I am in this. Don’t you see that? She’s better off dead. But if you say anything, you’ll go where I go. If it could be proved. Which I doubt. And we’ve waited too long already. We’ve told Verne one thing—we can’t change it.”
    “Where do you get this ‘we’ stuff?”
    “Alex, if you don’t let go of me and stop acting like a fool, I’ll tell Verne something. I’ll tell him you did it. Because she caught you trying to attack me.”
    I grinned at her. Then I let go and stepped away. I started laughing. Bitter laughter. There was a defenseless old woman lying dead out there just because I’d decided to pay a visit to an old Army pal. I ceased laughing and stared at her.
    Petra’s fingers closed over my arm and she said, “Use your head, lover.” Then she turned and walked rapidly toward the rear of the house.
    I stood there and stared at the woodpecker-notched trunk of a tall pine tree in the yard. I knew I should leave now. Madge was waiting; a life that was becoming very remote was waiting. I’d been here a week, I should be planning to leave anyway. Only anyway I couldn’t leave now, and I felt the stir of that inside me, too. Excuses. Reasons. Somethings. Put it off. It was easy.
    I went on around toward the front again. Petra was all I’d called her and she had been right in everything she’d told me.
    Verne was sitting on a chair by the circular luncheon table staring at the body of his mother. As I broke through the hedge, he glanced up, then stood and started toward the house. I followed. On the doorstep he paused and turned.
    “I phoned the doctor,” he said. “A hell of a lot of good it’ll do to have a