Murder — Paid in Advance

Talmage Powell Murder — Paid in Advance

Quinn Norman watched his ex-wife come out of the lighted doorway of the apartment house across the quiet street. He felt a shiver go all the way through him as he pulled back into the shadows — as though Cindy would recognize him now after five years in the pen.

He stood there in the darkened doorway for a moment, watching Cindy move along the street. A tall, poised woman who looked younger than thirty. He wondered if other men still thought her as lovely as he had, before he knew how shallow and empty she actually was.

Go after her Norman, his desires urged. This is what you wanted. This is the moment you waited for. Get it over with. Give the world a break.

But he didn’t move. He stood watching as she rounded the corner, and was lost to sight. He wiped his sweating palms on his shabby coat. Slapped his right fist softly against his left hand. He knew where she was now. There wasn’t the urgency that had hurried him three thousand miles west here to the brink of the Pacific.

The strange urgency driving him to kill her. In place of that urgency settled a cold calm. To kill her wasn’t enough. To kill her and get away with it was the thing he wanted. He had paid for a murder he hadn’t done. It was simple arithmetic that he was owed a kill.

When he knew she was gone, Norman stepped out of the doorway and moved off in the opposite direction. His shadow bumped along ahead of him on the gray walk. For a while he watched it: elongated, shortened, widened, thinned. He had cast that shadow in a lot of places in his search for Cindy. It had been long and tiresome, asking about her, seeking, being sure and then finding: a blind alley, a stone wall.

Then, begin all over again. Start and ask and check and keep moving until your money ran out. Then you took a job for a while, and then it began again. He’d been here in San Jueneme for a month, and he hadn’t even been sure he’d found Cindy yet.

Until tonight.

He entered the paint-peeled boarding house and started up the stairs, his mind full of Cindy and all the things she had done to him. As he turned on the second landing, a girl’s cheery voice called out to him through an open door.

“Coffee, Quinn?”

He stopped with his hand on the bannister. He tensed his lean, wide shoulders. It had been all right, he’d told himself, to be friendly with dark-eyed Judy Conroy.

But it couldn’t be any more. Not since he had found Cindy. That changed everything. Quinn knew he had tried to keep it light and casual, but the way Judy felt about him wasn’t casual... And he refused to analyze the way he felt about her, at all.

“Tired,” he mumbled over his shoulder.

She had a dimple in her right cheek when she smiled. “Then you do need coffee, man!”

She stood in her open door, her smile growing more unsure as he hesitated. The light spilled out around her slender, lovely body. She’s so damned young, Quinn told himself. She spoke again.

“Please, Quinn? I won’t even make you stay for a second cup. Word of honor.”

Unwillingly, letting her see that he was unwilling, he followed her into her one-room apartment. Coffee was warming on the small stove, all right. Probably she’d lighted it when she heard his footsteps on the stairs.

He hurled his battered hat at a straight chair, and missed again. He always missed, and Judy smiled. Sitting at the oilcloth-covered table, he stared at the gray steam crawling from the coffee spout.

Judy poured his coffee, filled her own cup, and returned the pot to the stove. He drank his coffee absently, black, but Judy didn’t sit down facing him. She stood before him and smiled.

“Lose your job, Quinn?”

He looked up at her. He didn’t have a job to lose; he was still living on the last of the money he’d made on a job in Nevada. But he had let Judy think he worked. It was easier than explaining where he was all those hours, all those days he’d been seeking Cindy this month.

He sighed heavily. He’d let Judy believe a lot of things in the month since he’d met her on the stairs out there. He’d been going down hurriedly, and she’d been coming up, arms loaded with groceries. By the time they’d gathered up all the spilled apples and canned goods, they were friends.

He knew Judy was a model agency receptionist. Infrequently, she made extra money modeling. She thought he was a loader in a wholesale fruit place. It was one of the jobs he had held in his trek across the country. It was the first lie he could think of when Judy asked him.

Grimly, he gulped down the steaming coffee. She thought he was a working stiff, honest and down at the heels. She was forever fixing meals for him, on any pretext — except the truth: it was charity. She was sorry for him, and wanted to be sure he had enough to eat. In many women, he thought, it’s a simple transition from a feeling like that to love. Cooking for a man. Seeing him across a table. Neither was the male of the species immune to that kind of chemistry.