Applaud the Hollow Ghost Read Online Free

contemptuous conduct. I figured I’d do that right after the court apologized to me.
    So now I didn’t make much money, but I sure had lots of time. And it was my own. I could run, and work out at Dr. Sato’s dojo, and practice the piano. The income from a small trust I’d funded a few years earlier with my one-and-only big-time attorney’s fee—from a case for the Lady—wasn’t enough to live on. But I had friends as well as enemies, and they helped contort my resume to fit into the requirements of the Illinois Private Detectives Act well enough to get me a license, and even a firearm authorization card. With an occasional paying client, and a few gigs here and there in barrooms where people don’t listen too closely to the piano player, I got along.
    I couldn’t park on North Avenue because of the snow regulations, and I finally found a spot beside a funeral home. I finished the quart of chocolate milk and walked back to Melba’s. You couldn’t miss Melba’s. It was the nondescript little hole-in-the-wall with the full-size Ford conversion van parked at the fire hydrant out front.
    It’s funny how the local cops, the Feds, the Chicago Crime Commission—and maybe Geraldo and Oprah, too, for all I know—can identify the hangout of just about every player in the syndicate lineup. Sometimes you wonder what good it does. But, when you’re walking into the coffee shop where the father of the girl who says she was attacked by your client hangs out, it can be helpful to know that an old-time hood like Gus Apprezziano happens to hang out there, too. It makes you aware that there may be lots of fire power in the vicinity.
    The sign hanging inside the window said “CLOSED,” but the hasp they must have used to padlock the door from the outside whenever they left was hanging open and there were lights on inside. I pushed the door open and went in.
    The place was warm and full of the odors of overheated coffee and stale bacon grease and corned beef and garlic, and there should have been laughter and the jovial banter of regular customers and lots of local good cheer. Maybe Melba’s was that way sometimes. But this was three o’clock in the afternoon and what laughter and banter and cheer there’d been, if any, must have gone out with the lunch crowd.
    It was an old-fashioned room, four times as long as it was wide, with a Formica-topped table squeezed into the space in front of the plate glass window to the left of the door and a row of identical tables lined up straight ahead of me along the right wall, with four chairs at each one. A counter with stools ran along the left wall, then turned and made an L before it got to the back. A swinging door and a service window both opened into the kitchen in the rear.
    A large-breasted woman somewhere past sixty, with a pockmarked olive complexion and a long, narrow nose hanging over a beginner’s mustache, sat behind the near end of the counter. As I entered, her right hand drifted absently toward a stack of menus beside the cash register. When she looked up, though, her hand dropped down onto the menus. Meanwhile, her left hand was full of dollar bills, and there were little stacks of more bills set out in front of her.
    Farther down the counter, on the customers’ side, a woman sat on a stool with a pencil in her hand and a coffee mug and a Sun-Times on the counter in front of her. She wore a black leather coat and bright red pants tucked into black leather boots with very high heels. She glanced up at me, then returned to her crossword puzzle. Three men in shirtsleeves—all of them large and none of them over forty years old—huddled over the table farthest from the door. Their heads turned my way and I recognized one of them as Steve Connolly. His reddish-brown hair was thick and wavy, and he had the head and broad shoulders of an all-pro linebacker. He wasn’t as wide lower down in