Free Murder for Two by George Harmon Coxe Page B

were needling Casey!
    â€œHe’s very nice, isn’t he?” Karen Harding said.
    â€œNice? I never heard anyone call him that before. He’s big but he doesn’t shove little guys around. He goes around grumbling and crabbing and finding fault with this and that, but it doesn’t mean a thing. It’s an act. You know why? Because he’s got a heart that big and he doesn’t want anybody to know that ’way down deep he’s a sentimentalist or that he’d break a leg for a guy he liked. To hear him tell it you’d think he never had a break. You’d think he had all his illusions kicked out of him, that he hated his job, and that if he could he’d quit it in a minute. Hah! He wouldn’t trade places with Rockefeller. He tried to get in the Army this morning. To fight. He could have had jobs with a couple of those picture magazines. He could have been taking pictures in Australia or Egypt or any place else, only he didn’t want that. Well, they turned him down this morning because he had a trick knee. They don’t know what they’re doing, those guys, but—I don’t know. I’m kind of glad they didn’t take him. He’d probably get himself killed the first damned day they gave him an assignment, the big lug.”
    Karen Harding sat very still, aware now that Wade was looking at something a long way off and that for the moment he was not conscious of her, nor of the half-eaten sandwich in his hand. What Tom Wade had said was neither very polished nor grammatical, but thinking of what he meant she knew she’d never heard a nicer tribute.
    â€œYou like him very much, don’t you?” she said.
    Wade looked at his sandwich. He took a bite. He remembered his first days when he hardly knew the difference between a flashbulb and a spread light. He remembered Casey coaching him and bullying him and covering up for him when he missed assignments and getting him out of jams his own recklessness and stupidity had fashioned. He took a swallow of beer.
    â€œHe’s just the greatest guy in the world, that’s all. And the best damned photographer.”
    He took some more beer and put down the bottle; then he looked at her and seemed to realize that for a few moments he had been a long way off. He grinned, embarrassed.
    â€œI guess I kind of got wound up.”
    â€œI’m glad you did.”
    â€œBut don’t ever tell him what I said,” Wade cautioned. “He’ll break my neck.”
    â€œAll right,” Karen Harding said and then, as the silence came between them, she thought of the film in her bag. She glanced at her watch. “Can you develop infrared film?” she asked abruptly.
    â€œSure.”
    â€œCould you develop this?”
    Wade looked at the 35 millimeter film. He grinned at her again. It was like asking him if he could brush his teeth.
    â€œYou mean now? Come on. What’ve you been doing, fooling with blackout bulbs?”
    Karen Harding said she had and Wade led her through a doorway, past the dimly lighted printing-room to the row of inky cubbyholes beyond. After that she could hear him doing things but she couldn’t see a thing until after the film was in the developer a few minutes and he turned on the dark-red safelight recessed in the wall.
    Presently they were in the printing-room and Wade was drying the film in front of a hot air fan. He sounded a little shocked when he saw how much film had been wasted.
    â€œYou only got five exposures here,” he said.
    Karen Harding said it didn’t matter and watched him adjust the enlarger. Wade made five prints without really looking at the subject matter and she asked him please to make an extra one of the print she had taken of the two men with Henry Byrkman. It wasn’t until Wade had taken the six prints from the ferrotype dryer that he realized three of the pictures were of the same subject.
    He looked at them closely,