Riders on the Storm
- Автор: Горман Эд
- Серия: Sam McCain #10
- Год: 2014
- Язык: английский
- Год: Pegasus
- ISBN: 978-1-60598-625-8
- Жанр: Криминальные детективы
Электронная книга - «Riders on the Storm». Краткое содержание книги:
There were at least two ashtrays overflowing. There was a water ring from a glass on the mahogany coffee table. A blue-covered throw pillow had fallen on the floor. A section of the newspaper hung from the phone stand. In a fair number of homes this would be normal everyday life. But in Karen’s case this signaled breakdown.
After handing me my bottle of Hamm’s, she walked over to the couch and sat down. I admired her most excellent legs and waited for her to talk.
She began by patting a small stack of papers next to her. “I’m going to try very hard not to cry.”
“Cry all you want, Karen. Seriously. You’ve helped me through some real bad nights of my own.”
“I’m sick of crying, Sam. And now I’m sick of trying to save this marriage.”
So he had told her.
“I went to see him tonight and he acted like everything was fine. I know you were there earlier. Anyway, by the time I left there he was almost like his old self.”
So he hadn’t told her.
“Then I got home and I made the mistake of going in his den again. Since I found those letters I’ve become compulsive about it. It’s as if I’ve conditioned myself to distrust him. As far as I know, he was faithful to me all the time we were married up until he got back from Vietnam. Maybe he’s ‘acting out,’ as the man at the VA told us. I didn’t find anything in his den tonight but when I looked in the front closet I saw this valise I bought him for his birthday a few years ago. It was leaning against the wall so I picked it up.”
She paused to sit up very straight and to take a deep, deep breath. Then she picked up the sheaf of papers. “He has a new girlfriend. I shouldn’t say girlfriend — he tells her he wants to marry her.”
I wanted to hate him but I couldn’t. The war had destroyed him. The old Will, the good, compassionate, clear-thinking Will had been killed along with the little girl his bullets had ripped apart.
She held them out to me. “Please take these, will you, Sam? Read them. See how far gone he is.”
I knew what I’d find in the papers. April. But I had no idea how I’d respond.
I got them all right and I came back and sat down and put them in my lap all right but I didn’t read them. Not right away. Because when I did read them she was going to ask me if he’d said anything about the woman he was writing to. And if I lied to her and she later found out that I’d lied to her she would never trust me again.
She lighted anther cigarette but it took three angry little attempts to make her silver lighter light. But it wasn’t the lighter that wasn’t doing well, it was her.
“Read the one on top, Sam. Even when we were first going out he didn’t say things like that to me.”
Now I lighted a cigarette. It took me two matches.
I lifted the top white sheet of typing paper and read the first paragraph.
You’re my first thought in the morning and my last at night. At first you were only my heart, but now you are my soul as well.
I had the semi-serious idea that he’d found an article or even a little paperback that listed all the things a love song should contain.
And it went on that way for the entire page. If there was a romantic cliché he missed, I couldn’t find it. I tried not to think, cliché or no cliché, of the effect all the cornball language would have on poor Karen.
I raised my head and when our eyes met, I shook my head. She started crying then.
“Read a few more. See what I’m up against.”
“Oh, I think I’ve got the idea here good enough, Karen.”
Crying more now. “Please just read a few more. Look how much he loves her.”
“You’re punishing yourself, Karen. I don’t want to help you.”
“Just get to the one where he says he wants to have children. Children — I don’t know how he could even think of such a thing. Isn’t Peggy Ann enough for him?”
The children reference was not in the next letter nor the next one nor the next one. But there in the middle of the following one was that word — “children” — and it might as well have been in neon. Yup, he and April would have a whole passel of wee ones and they would live somewhere over the rainbow and speak only in the language of the worst romance novels. And their wee ones would speak the same language, too, and in time have their own passel of treacle-speaking wee ones. What he was outlining was the hammiest Broadway musical ever created.
But then I glanced down a few lines and when I saw that partial sentence I realized that Will had lied to me.
“I’m so sorry, Karen.”
I had a difficult time not bursting out the door. I really needed to get going.
I put the papers down. “I want to call Mary. All right if I use the phone in the kitchen?”
“Of course.”
She didn’t seem curious about why I didn’t use the phone in the living room.
I kept my voice low.
“She’s in terrible shape, Mary. I don’t think she should be alone. Would it be all right for her to stay with you tonight?”
“Of course. God, I can’t imagine what she’s going through.”
It took a full fifteen minutes to persuade Karen to spend the night at Mary’s but finally she agreed. And finally, still expressing second thoughts, she put some things in a small blue canvas bag and we went out to my car. Where she expressed third thoughts before actually getting inside.
On the way to Mary’s she said she was acting like a child and that was undoubtedly why I was treating her like one. Then she kind of sank into herself and said she was so tired she could barely keep her eyes open.
I made sure that Karen was in the safe and comforting presence of Mary and then I was in my car and speeding away.
25
One light burned in the Victorian house that stood silhouetted in the moonlight, all turrets and gables and broken roof lines. The light was on the first floor front where the waiting area was.
I saw all this as I stood next to my car, which I’d parked half a block away in a residential neighborhood just now bedding down for the night. I didn’t want to announce my visit.
I kept to the shadows cast by streetlights and heavily leafed trees. Now would be an inconvenient time for Foster — or any of his force, for that matter — to show up because I had my forty-five jammed down the beltline of my trousers.
I walked wide when I got to the cross street where the Victorian lay. There were no other houses or buildings on either side of it for half a block or so. I didn’t want anybody to see me approaching, though with the upstairs apartment lights out I wasn’t sure anybody was home. I went down half a block and then walked back using a long windbreak of pines as cover.
In back of the Victorian was an asphalt parking area for clients. On the far side of the lot was a two-story garage. Using a side window, I could see that two cars were there. This didn’t necessarily mean they were home. They were social people. Friends might have picked them up for the evening.
Then, my eyes adjusting to the gloom of the garage interior, I saw the two outsize suitcases standing next to the trunk of the smart black Oldsmobile.
I looked up at the dark windows on the back of the house. I wanted to be sure no one was watching me.
I went in through the side door of the garage. Smells of car oil and the mown-lawn scent from a small riding mower. I walked over to the Oldsmobile. Two dark traveling bags were laid across the back seat. I walked around to the trunk. The lid was a quarter open. Another traveling bag. The suitcases on the floor would be set in there and the traveling bag spread across them.
I wasn’t looking at a vacation; I was looking at an escape.
I walked to the front of the car, opened the hood and took care of something. Then I closed the hood and left the garage.