Free Murder for the Bride by John D. MacDonald Page B

It’s a dry Martini with absinthe. They call it an Obituary. Good name, too.”
    He closed the door quietly behind him. All the time I showered and changed, throughout the late dinner at Galatoire’s, I tried to decide how I would handle Zeck’s bit of information, knowing all the time that my mind was already made up. The sensible thing to do was to make contact with the Jones boys and give them the data and let them put a net around the entire area Zeck had mentioned. But the blood-darkened face and horrid bulging eyes of Laura kept drifting across the back of my mind and I knew that I wanted a quiet few minutes with Haussmann. All to myself. If she had tried to cross him up by leaving him out of the trade for amnesty, he would have killed her. And I knew that in a few moments with him I could find out.
    At eleven o’clock I went into my act. I went out on the shallow balcony into the night, stripped to the waist. I stretched and yawned and went back in. Fifteen minutes later I put the lights out. At eleven-thirty, dressed in the darkest clothes I had, I slipped out onto the balcony, stepped over the railing, lowered myself, hung by my fingertips, and dropped the last few inches onto the gallery roof. I crouched against the front of the building, invisible from the street.
    “You hear ’at thumpin’, honey?” a lazy voice asked directly below me.
    “Din’ hear no thumpin’,” a woman answered.
    I kept low and close to the front of the building. The galleries were of different heights, but they all adjoined. There was a party on one. A party so noisy I could have walked across over their heads trying to stamp holes in the gallery roof. The last gallery was dark, and I stretched out flat and looked down at the sidewalk, thirty feet below. I hunched forward until I could look into the galleries, my head upside down. The screen of vines was thick. I moved to the outside corner and slid down the iron post onto the empty gallery. It was a full ten minutes before there was no pedestrian traffic underneath. I slid down the second post to the sidewalk and walked fast to the corner, hurried around it, and flattened myself in a shallow doorway. No hurrying footsteps, no whistle, no siren.
    I came out onto Canal on the Basin Street corner, and got a cab that dropped me a block from Harrigan’s apartment.
    She was still asleep. The fan whirred softly.
    I washed the grime off my hands and read an ancient magazine until twelve-thirty. Then I went into the bedroom, reached over her to the head of the bed, and clicked on the bed lamp.
    She sat up with a hard intake of breath, her eyes wide, startled, fearful. She let her breath out with a great sigh.
    “Sorry I startled you.”
    “What time is it, please?”
    “After midnight. There’s the stuff I bought you. I’ll wait out in the other room.”
    As I waited I heard the far-off drone of the shower, and I thought of the many times I had heard the same sound as I waited for Laura. She had bathed so very often. Almost as though there were some dirt she was trying to scrub off that wouldn’t come off. Dirt that Tilda Renner had acquired, and Laura Rentane couldn’t remove. Ever.
    At last the girl came out. She wore the lime and white print dress I had bought for her. She was barefoot, her dark blonde hair pulled tightly back, and wearing no make-up. She seemed younger than I remembered, and oddly shy. I was on the couch. She sat in a rattan chair facing the couch, one leg pulled up under her. She reachedover and took my cigarettes and matches from the coffee table.
    “I suppose you want me to talk to you now,” she said.
    “You suppose right. I always talk to people who hold knives on me. And you baffle me. Sometimes your speech is very American. And then it goes quaint all of a sudden. What’s your name?”
    “My right name. Talya Dvalianova. I shall tell you the story of Talya. A very stupid story.” Her voice was an expressionless monotone. “My father was an