Hard Case Crime: Fade to Blonde Read Online Free

couldn’t believe his luck, Ray Corson himself, right there in his own office. I’d just wanted toget myself up to date, but on impulse I decided to pay off the rest of the car. I liked the idea of having something no one could take from me without stealing. It must have been a stupid move, because it delighted Joey, and as a token of our new friendship he tried to trade me up to a gray ’50 Merc. After that I just drove around enjoying the sunshine. I didn’t have much money left, but I owned my car outright and I felt too good to go see Rebecca LaFontaine. Guys probably didn’t feel good around her for very long.
    She’d given me the address of a boarding house on Flower Avenue in Venice. It was a low two-story building with a surf shop and a hardware store on the ground floor and, above, what once must have been a floor of cheap offices, and of course that’s where I wound up. I pushed through a cracked plate glass door and went upstairs. The stairs were covered with a runner of green carpet, black and shiny with dirt and worn down to the silvery cords underneath. They were greasy. What the hell do you have to do to get stairs greasy? At the top was a corridor lined with doors with pebbled glass panels, each of which was crudely painted with a number in black, some of which still bore old company names in flaking black paint or gold leaf. At the end of the corridor was a Dutch door daubed in black with the word MGR. The top half was open. Inside, a woman in a housedress was watching TV. She looked up at me and then back at the set.
    I walked down the hall to Number 6. I couldn’t make out what had once been lettered on the glass. Someone had scraped most of it off except for the word APPRAISED . I knocked and heard Rebecca call, “It’s open.”
    There wasn’t room inside for much but a bed, which Rebecca was just then sharing with the biggest old cowboy I’d ever seen. He had the boots, the stovepipejeans, the shirt with pearl snaps, and his hat was on the pillow and wasn’t a disappointment. He and Rebecca were sitting side by side on the edge of the bed with a card game laid out between them. He started to get up, but Rebecca said, “Sit there and take your punishment, Lorrie. Excuse my manners, Mr. Corson, but I’m almost done giving this fellow a whuppin’.”
    “She is, too,” he told me.
    He looked like a whuppin’ from Rebecca was what he’d prayed for as a child on Christmas morning.
    I watched them play for a couple of minutes, each turning over the cards very intently. Finally Rebecca laid down a card and said contentedly, “That’s gin. Lorrie, I’d like you to meet Ray Corson. Mr. Corson, Lorin Shade.”
    Shade got up at once to shake hands with me. Just when I thought he was done standing up, he’d stand up some more. He shook my hand carefully, like he’d learned that hands break easy. He had a short nose and a pocked round face, and he really was a size. I’d put roofs on smaller things than Lorin Shade. She said, “Mr. Corson and I might be doing a little business together, Lorrie. Mr. Corson used to be a boxer.”
    “A boxer! I like that,” he said. He put up his fists, smiling, and I obligingly put up mine, and he faked a few hooks and jabs at me. I was annoyed to find I could barely keep them off me. He was fast, along with the rest of it. He dropped his hands. “I like that,” he said wistfully.
    “You could do the work,” I told him.
    I wondered what she wanted with me if she had a big boy like Shade on a string.
    “Lorrie’s from Warren City, Oklahoma,” she said. “But he lives right down the hall. He’s a stunt rider for the movies.”
    “Well, that’s my plan,” he said. “That’s my long-rangeplan. Right now I’m at the Ever-Brite Car Wash over on Del Amo.”
    “Got to start somewhere,” I said.
    “That’s right. We’re over on Del Amo, just near Anza. You keep going like you’s headin’ for the beach? You’ll see us on the right, just before