Investigation Read Online Free Page B

whatever. Tim has a big future promised if the right man wins. He is also certain that my future, left in his hands, if the right man wins, will be nothing short of terrific.
    Of course, Tim ignores facts that don’t fit with his plans. He considers it no big deal that my wife and I have sold our home in Queens; bought a condominium in Florida, where my wife is waiting for me to join her come the end of November. She fully expects that I’ll pack up and leave the two-room apartment we took on a short-term lease in one of the old buildings near the Forest Hills Tennis Stadium. And go down to Florida. And take a job in her brother’s construction company. Her brother, as far as I’m concerned, is a crooked, smug, stupid bastard who thinks the same of me. I’m not sure how all of this came about. It just seems to have happened, according to a plan worked out so long ago I can’t remember when it wasn’t part of our understanding. Once the girl was married, and she was last year, once the boy graduated high school and was set in college, which he was, once my twenty years were in, that would be it. All set. The rest of my life. Except that now that it was practically reality I have been taking a good hard look at what the rest of my life would be with brother-in-law Fred, and I don’t like it. At all. And another strange thing. After twenty-three years of marriage, of living with Jen and the kids, this was the first time I’d ever lived alone. In my whole life. I had gone from my parents to the Army to Jen. Now I wasn’t accountable, in any way, to anyone. I had thought I’d be lonely. Jen thought I’d be lonely.
    The funny thing was, I wasn’t lonely at all.
    “All right. Let’s take a statement from the parents, Joe. We’ll talk about the other thing later.”
    In a monotone, Kitty Keeler answered Neary’s questions. She stared at the reels of the tape recorder on the desk and seemed to pace herself to the slow revolutions. She repeated what she had already told us. That she had last seen her sons between one and one-thirty this morning. Had taken sleeping pills; showered; gone to bed. Woke up at seven-thirty. The boys were gone.
    “I thought George had the boys. I thought—” She didn’t cry or anything. She just stopped speaking.
    She had changed; she was a different version of the same woman. She seemed translucent. Her paleness had gone almost to the bones of her face. Her cheekbones seemed to shine and protrude through the tightly stretched skin. She reminded me of a small, shining, transparent glass animal: fragile, breakable, easily shattered. And yet she had a curious strength, directed toward her husband.
    George Keeler, in his grief, seemed to bloat and swell; the lines of his body became indefinite and unclear. He turned to his wife, his face totally trusting and dependent. Kitty took control of both her husband and herself with a hard tenderness, direct and businesslike and effective. It was a surprise, this tough concern for George. She had been totally uncaring of him earlier. Before the bodies of their children had been found.
    “Mr. Keeler, do you have any idea, at all, who might have done this to your sons?”
    A wildness came into George Keeler’s voice. He waved his arms in front of him as he spoke, then stared at his hands, which trembled violently.
    “Look at that,” he said, needing to account for his hands. “The adrenalin shot makes them shake like that.”
    His wife reached over, touched his arm, her fingers closed on his wrist. Her touch settled him. He told his story for a second time in almost the exact same phrases. He had come over to the apartment after Kitty called him; searched briefly; called the police. He raised his arms in a terrible, empty gesture, then let them fall heavily onto his thighs.
    “And then he took me to that park.” Keeler looked at me for confirmation. “And then I saw them. The boys. I saw them. My boys.”
    His meaty shoulders heaved forward, his