Read Online Tears Are for Angels by Paul Connolly - Free Book Online

now?
        "Hell," I said, "you never knew a guy to turn it down when it came along, did you?"
        He pursed his lips.
        "Some," he said. "One or two."
        "Go to hell," I said, and we went on out into the hall.
        And, like death, the thing I had forgotten came at me out of the dark.
        My hands.
        I hadn't washed them. Not since firing the shot into my arm.
        Did Walt know about paraffin tests? The only thing he knew about police work was how to handle a gun. But he could have learned about that test like I had, reading Dick Tracy. And if he got suspicious… I swore to myself as we came out on the porch. The rain had stopped, but the night smelled of it and the air was cool. The moon was out now and it glinted on a puddle in front of the steps.
        We started down the steps and I let a foot drag and pitched forward. My good arm slipped through Bill's fingers and I went lace down in the puddle, both arms in front of me.
        The pain was, for a moment, more than I could bear, and I could almost feel the tremendous surge of the blood again. But my hands were deep in the puddle and I ground them into the mud and covered them over the wrists with the rain water and let them stay there.
        Bill quickly helped me up then and we looked at the blood, pumping regularly again.
        "I better get Walt to fix that," he said.
        "The hell with Walt." I started toward the car.
        He hesitated, then came after me.
        It was a long ride to town, but no longer than my thoughts, and the shooting, slashing pains in my arm and shoulder hurt no more than the nails someone slowly drove into my sides.
        Lucy, I thought.
        Lucy.
        Why did you do it?
        
***
        
        They held a coroner's inquest, but that's as far as it went.
        Ours is a pretty backwoods county. It looked like suicide and I had said it was suicide, so as far as they were concerned it was suicide.
        It wasn't as if any of them had really known Lucy well, grown up and gone to school with her. It wasn't even as if the ones of them who had known her at all even liked her very much. Lucy had had New York City written all over her, and in Coshocken County, where the county scat town of St. Johns has a population of less than a thousand, that went over like a polecat at a picnic.
        The clothes she ordered from New York stores, the way she walked and wore her hair and talked and laughed… the county never got used to any of those things. So when everything pointed to her having killed herself, trying to include me in the deal, the coroner's jury and everyone else chalked it up to the fact that she was a Yankee and a mighty queer piece to boot.
        After it all happened, I began to feel that somehow in this fact lay the key to what Lucy had done. I had known she was lonely on the farm, far away from friends and familiar places, but there had been no outward indications of boredom or strain.
        We'd been married in New York, just before I went overseas as an engineer captain. When I came back, nearly two years later, I was a major and the war was over and Coshocken County looked, from New York's gay spots, like the hind end of hell. So I kept the oak leaves on for a while, and Lucy and I had a spell of Army life on the West Coast.
        We had a high old time, what with my pay and the big postwar profits from the farm my father had left me, and which Brax Jordan, my lawyer, was operating for me. But it palled on me gradually, and one day when I suggested I resign and we try Coshocken for a while, she said all right, without eagerness but seemingly without regret.
        We had been there a little less than a year the night I came home to find her in bed with Dick Stewart. Somewhere in that year, the boredom and the quiet and the loneliness must have become too much for the city-bred girl. Only she hadn't told me about it, and maybe