Murder Gets Easier

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The morning was clear and warm with the first whisperings of spring echoing northward. The lettering on the windows still looked nice: JOSEPH THOMAS, New and Used Books, Magazines, Collector’s Items. He still loved the pleasant mustiness, the warm gloom of the store with its hundreds of used books and magazines that crowded the shelves. He was young and in good health. But a lump of midwinter lay inside Joey Thomas.

To begin with, he’d about decided that as a business man he was too small a flicker even to term a flash in the pan. His ravening creditors had promised to claw him to pieces and peddle the parts to medical schools.

Then there was his girl, Cora. She had, he thought, a one track mind. She’d fallen right in with his plans, when he’d come out of the army those months ago, to establish his used-book business, live off of it, and make a writer of himself. He’d done one book — Corpse In The House by Joseph J. Thomas — a psychological thriller about a man who murdered his wife and walled her in a tiny alcove upstairs, using quicklime generously, only to believe that he began hearing scratchings on the floor of the alcove. Three scratches, a pause, three scratches, a pause... Like bony fingers trailing across the protagonist’s ceiling, reminding him that he had killed his wife on the third day of the third month of the year.

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