The Third Talmage Powell Crime MEGAPACK™: 25 Classic Mysteries

She gave a little sigh, her green eyes holding with his for a brief second. “Maybe so, at that. But we’ve been through the routine before, haven’t we? So leave it as friends. Don’t spoil the bit that we had, Eddie.”

He plucked at his lower lip.

“I really believe you’re going to throw me out.” He breathed out heavily. “In that case, what’ll I do with this?” Reaching inside his jacket pocket, he drew out the wad of hundred-dollar bills. With a melodramatic movement, he threw them toward the ceiling. The cluster broke apart, and he watched the widening of Joella’s green eyes as the bills fluttered down about her.

“Some shower, doll,” he chuckled. “Just the first drops. Plenty more where that came from.”

He reached and took her slender wrist. She was gazing raptly at the clutter of money, making no resistance as he pulled her onto his lap.

“Time we turned in again, doll,” he murmured against her ear.

She was a warm rustling, arms gliding about his neck. “I’ve missed you, Eddie. Really I have.”

“So let’s make up for lost time with a weekend in Las Vegas.”

“You’re beautiful, Eddie...”

At eleven o’clock Sunday night Eddie dragged his exhausted body and brain into his down-at-the-heels bachelor pad. He struggled out of jacket and necktie, tossing the garments on a chair that already held a dirty shirt and sweater. Grunting with the effort, he opened the hide-a-bed convertible couch, kicked off his shoes, and lowered his fatigued bones.

Tired as he was, he lay on his back grinning at the ceiling, licking his memory chops. What a weekend! It shimmered in his mind, an elysian haze. First-class accommodations on the jetliner... the swank of the Vegas hotel... the intimate dinners... floor shows... the balconied room with the king-size bed... the smoky smoothness of expensive Scotch sipped beside the pool... the craps table...

All of it a lovely, lovely backdrop for the warmth of Joella’s arms, the fire of her kisses.

They’d gone through every dime in four days, but Eddie kept that thought out of his mind. Right now, he didn’t want anything to spoil the memories.

The skirling of the alarm clock reached into the deep vacancy of sleep earlier than usual the following morning. Eddie mumbled himself awake, reaching out to turn off the clock and lying there for a moment staring at nothing in particular. He was drearily hungup with the idea of being penned in the jury box. He dosed himself with strong medicine, the thought of Baxter Wood’s twenty-five thou. It gave him the energy to get out of bed.

He came out of the building an hour later, his appearance totally out of keeping with the messy apartment he left behind. Dressed conservatively and groomed to his fingernails, he might have been a bright young customer’s man in a brokerage office.

A tension gnawed at him as he drove downtown, parked the Toyota in an all-day lot, and walked into the impersonal fifteen-story stone mass of the courthouse.

He didn’t doubt Clara, or himself, but he wouldn’t feel really easy until he was actually on the Chavez jury.

The jury pool room on the fourth floor was filling with people of all shapes, sizes and colors when Eddie strolled in.

Clara appeared at nine o’clock sharp, in sensible skirt, blouse, fiats, hair in a brown bun at her nape. She was carrying a clipboard and looked so drab and frumpy, compared to Joella in Vegas, that Eddie felt a little sorry for her.

She stood beside a desk in the corner of the room, introducing herself and reciting her routine jazz in a sing-song voice. She commended them all for answering the call to civic duty, mentioned the importance of the jury system under the American banner of freedom, and touched on the state laws governing responsibilities of jurymen.

Then she was calling out the lists, and a short time later Eddie was among the group being herded by a bored deputy into a huge courtroom. The vaulted expanse seemed to Eddie to have all the warmth of a mausoleum, when he took his place, third chair front row, in the jury box.

The lawyers were shuffling papers and exchanging pleasantries at their tables. John Ward was the prosecutor, a lean, spare man with a grizzled face. Wood had retained the firm of Proctor, Proctor, and Adams to defend his son. Old man Proctor himself, who looked like a wily white-haired Mississippi senator, was in charge of the legal battery.

The bailiff rapped a gavel. All rose in the crowded courtroom as the judge entered. The bailiff called court to session with his “O-yez, O-yez.”

The following hour was more nerve-wracking than Eddie had anticipated. Defense and prosecution questioned each juror in turn. The defense excused juror number eight, the prosecution five and nine. The alternates who took their seats were accepted. Eddie surreptitiously pressed a handkerchief in his wet palms and experienced a pleasant inner unwinding. The trial was underway, and he was in his twenty-five thousand dollar seat.

He slipped his first direct look at young Richard Wood, slouched at the defense table. The boy had the brawn, the bulldozer-operator look of his father. Aside from their years, the main difference in father and son was visible in Richie’s petulant, self-centered curl of lips. The punk kid, Eddie reflected, had the natural sneer of a spoiled brat.