Lucky Stiff by Craig Rice (best large ebook reader txt) 📕

“You had us in a spot,” Jesse Conway said, “and you know it. We had to give in to your crazy scheme. But what’s in your mind? What comes next?”

“I don’t know,” Anna Marie said lightly. She sounded as though she didn’t care.

She looked out through the window of Jesse Conway’s limousine at the lights of Chicago’s streets flashing by. Funny to see lights again. Lights and people and automobiles. There was the marquee of a theater. Perhaps tomorrow she’d go to a movie. Funny to be able to go to a movie. Funny to be out of the cell. Funny to be alive at all.

“What time is it?” she asked.

“Quarter of eleven,” Jesse Conway said. “Now, look here, Anna Marie—”

“In an hour and fifteen minutes,” she said with a little laugh, “I’ll be dead.”

Jesse Conway started to speak, changed his mind, and shrugged his shoulders. At last he said, “Well, where do you want to go?”

“My apartment first,” Anna Marie said. “I suppose I can still get in.”

Jesse Conway cleared his throat in an embarrassed fashion. “I still have the key, you know. Tomorrow I was to go in and get all your clothes, and send them to your Aunt Bess out in Grove Junction.”

“I remember,” Anna Marie said coldly, “and you can go ahead as per schedule. Only I’m afraid Aunt Bess will have to wait.” She was silent for a few minutes, thinking. “I’ll find a safe hide-out in the morning. You can bring me the clothes and some other things, and money. I don’t suppose I can touch my own dough.”

“Hardly,” Jesse Conway said.

Anna Marie laughed. “That’s the hell of being a ghost. Oh, well. You can advance me whatever I need, and I’ll give it back to you when I’m through with this monkey business.”

“Whatever you say,” he said wearily. “But why the hide-out? Nobody’ll try to take you back to jail.”

“Because ghosts never appear in the daytime,” she told him.

The car stopped in front of a modest apartment building. The street was dark and deserted, but Anna Marie glanced around for possible spectators before she crossed the sidewalk. Jesse Conway unlocked a side entrance on the ground floor and turned on the lights. Anna Marie paused just inside the door and looked.

There was a thin film of dust on the yellow brocade love seat, with its wickedly simpering carved cupids. There was dust on the thick pile carpet, on the deep-cushioned chairs, and on the built-in bar. Some news photographer had left a flash bulb on the gilt coffee table.

“Big Joe Childers did me proud,” Anna Marie said. “Too bad some son-of-a-bitch killed him.”

She told Jesse Conway to wait for her and went on into the bedroom, which she had perversely decorated with muslin and dimity, a young girl’s four-poster bed, hooked rugs, and big, pale pink ribbon bows on the curtains. In it, her flamboyant beauty stood out like a firecracker in an old-fashioned garden, and she knew it.

While Jesse Conway waited impatiently and apprehensively in the next room, she poured handfuls of perfumed salts into the tub, ran in steaming water, and took a long, luxurious bath. Then she dressed, slowly and meticulously, reveling as much in the privacy as in the comforts of her room. To bathe and dress without one of those weasel-eyed female wardens watching—that was something!

Half an hour later she came back into the living room. Jesse Conway looked up, and gasped.

She wore a close-fitting, obviously costly, pale gray suit. The jacket was collarless, and fastened at her throat with a dull gold clasp. The skirt flared very slightly between her hip and her knee. Her tiny slippers were gray, and her incredibly sheer stockings were the exact color of her skin. There was a little gray pillbox hat on the back of her tawny head, and from it floated an immense, graceful, bright pink veil. She carried bright pink gloves, and the purse under her arm was made of wide, diagonal stripes of pink suede and gold kid.

“Good God!” Jesse Conway said. Then he took out his handkerchief, sponged his brow, and said, “But that’s the—those are the clothes—”

“It’s what I had on the night I was supposed to have shot Big Joe,” she said, smiling. “Becoming outfit, isn’t it?”

Jesse Conway said, “Very.” He looked at her again, closely. She’d made up her lovely face so that it was very pale. The lipstick she’d used was almost lavender. There was a deep smudge of purplish eye shadow on her lids.

“You look white as death,” Jesse Conway said. He bit the last word off suddenly.

“That’s the idea,” Anna Marie told him. Now give me about twenty bucks and you can tell me good night. Tomorrow come in and get all my clothes out of here, and all the make-up and stuff I left on top of the dresser. I’ll let you know where to send it, along with some more money.”

He rose and stood looking at her, twisting his hat brim between his fingers. At last he said, “Anna Marie, you’re insane.”

“Maybe,” she said lightly. She shrugged her shoulders, took a cigarette from her pink enamel case and lit it. “People have been known to go insane, waiting for weeks to be led to the electric chair.” She blew out a cloud of smoke and looked at him through it, her eyes narrowed. “And you know, I bet you’d never have come near me tonight except for that lucky accident of the confession—which you had nothing to do with.”

He tried to meet her eyes, failed, and sank down on the yellow brocade love seat, looking at the floor, wordless. Anna Marie stood for a moment, watching him. It was hard not to feel sorry for a man who seemed so anxious, so dejected—and so guilty.

Jesse Conway was middle-aged, well dressed, and dignified. His hair was gray, but it was still heavy, and carefully brushed. He had a handsome, deeply lined face, though the eyes were just a trifle bloodshot, and the lips twitched ever so little when they should have been in repose. A fine figure of a man, his friends said.

“Believe me,” he muttered, “believe me, Anna Marie, it was none of my doing. I couldn’t help it. I knew you were being framed.”

“And you helped them frame me,” she said without bitterness, almost gaily. “My own lawyer.”

“No,” he said, looking at the floor. “No, that isn’t true. But my hands were tied, and you know it. Why, you were convicted before I was even engaged as your lawyer. And even then”—he crumpled a handkerchief between his palms, looked away—“you had the wrong lawyer, that’s all.”

Anna Marie remembered the weeks she’d spent in the death cell and laughed harshly. “That’s no news to me.”

“You don’t understand,” he said dully. “That isn’t what I meant at all. There’s one lawyer who might have spared you this. He’s not afraid of anything or anybody. They say he’s as crooked as a worm in an apple, but nobody can buy him if he doesn’t want to be bought. At your trial the judge and the jury were fixed, but even with that he might have come up with something. I even thought”—he paused—“it’s a damned shame that”—paused again and finally said, looking up, “I mean