Death of a Sunday Writer Read Online Free Page B

the office?”
    â€œWhy? No. That was just toughs. Kids. Why would bookies break into David’s office?” He was genuinely puzzled.
    â€œI don’t know. That policeman thought it was kidslooking for money. But maybe it was someone else. Do you know what case David was working on when he died?”
    Tse grinned. “I don’t think he had any cases lately.” His emphasis was derisive. “He’s been in his office a lot lately, reading, playing with the computer.”
    Lucy said nothing.
    â€œWhat are you going to do?” he asked her.
    â€œClean up the office, I guess. Find a way to get rid of the stuff.”
    â€œI’ll clean up for you. I’ll buy his stuff. I’ve got tenants who want a chair or a desk.”
    â€œBut then...oh, no.” Lucy was looking forward to finding out about her cousin, having a good poke around his private life, but she couldn’t say that to Tse. “No, that’s my job.”
    â€œOkay. If you want to sell anyfing, though, maybe the computer, I’ll buy it.”
    â€œI’ll have to see.”
    She worked steadily through the afternoon. The phone rang twice for her cousin; both callers rang off immediately at the sound of her voice. At the end of the day, she felt she had properly sorted the mess into two discrete piles. There was the material that seemed to have come out of the desk drawers. Most of this had to do with horses. There were pictures of horses, old clippings of accounts of major races, race programmes, guides to making money by gambling. There was some clean underwear, two laundered shirts, socks, toothpaste, combs, a pair of hair brushes, a bottle of cologne from Trumper of London, a pair of reading glasses.
    The pictures that had been pulled off the walls were also about horses, and as the afternoon wore on, Lucy began to get an impression of her cousin. Within the limits of his fluctuating income, he was a dapper dresser who affected a British ’Members Enclosure’ style of costume, and was obsessed with horses, not just with betting. There was evidence — some pictures, a book on equitation — that at some earlier and probably lighter period Trimble had even tried to ride.
    From the filing cabinet, she learned that his last case as a private detective was apparently three years before. Each case was recorded on a single sheet of hand-written paper in a file folder. There were fifty or sixty such folders. She pointed this out to Tse on one of the many occasions that he put his head round the door to see how she was getting on.
    â€œTry the computer,” Tse said. “After he got the computer he put everything on it. I told you, he never stopped playing with it, moving paragraphs, stuff like that.”
    Of course. She reserved the computer for later.
    At six, Tse appeared again, and she asked him how to get to Trimble’s apartment.
    Trimble had lived in a building south of Bloor Street, near Honest Ed’s; she found her cousin’s name among the tenants listed in the basement. A brief look around the tiny studio apartment told her that it was no more than a camp. There was a single bed, an armchair, a television set and a kitchen table and chairs. Mostly there were clothes, slightly horsey jackets, an off-white raincoat of a military type, and even an old pair of riding boots. It seemed a sound idea to call the Salvation Army to cart it away.
    By the time she had finished looking around, she was hungry, and she walked back down to Bloor Street where she had noticed on some of the side streets people sitting outside, eating at not-very-expensive looking cafés, the sort of places where she could have some supper and watch the people on the street. She found a place in the next block which had an awning over the sidewalk and took a table. Although Kingston was only two hundred and thirty-five kilometres away, she had hardly visited Toronto for the last fifteen years because