Man on a Leash Read Online Free

junkie boyfriend on the side.”
    “And I suppose he was just keeping those forty boxes of Upmann cigars for some girl? Maybe she didn’t want her mother to know she smoked.”
    Romstead gestured impatiently. “Cigars are not heroin.”
    “No, but they’re contraband.”
    “Only in the United States. He smoked ‘em all the time. Said tobacco had no politics.”
    Brubaker removed his own cigar and looked at it. “And I have to smoke these goddamned ropes.” He shrugged. “Oh, well, if Castro was chairman of the Republican National Committee, I still couldn’t afford his cigars.”
    “Well, look,” Romstead said. “It seems to me there’s a big hole in your reasoning somewhere. If he bought this crap for a quarter million dollars, as you say, and then sold it to somebody else at a profit, he must have got more than forty dollars for it. It wasn’t at the house, and it wasn’t in the apartment, so what happened to it?”
    “Those hoods got it, obviously. The same time they got him.”
    “It must have been at the house, then, if they came up here looking for him. Was there any sign of a fight?”
    “None at all. But don’t forget, he was playing with professionals. They don’t come on like Laurel and Hardy.”
    “You’re convinced of that? Then there’s not much chance of catching them?”
    There was a sudden darkening of anger in the chief deputy’s face, gone just as quickly as he got it under control. “Jesus Christ, Romstead, I know how you feel, but look at the hole we’re in. It wasn’t anybody here that killed your father. We’re just a geographical accident; all we’ve got is a dead body and jurisdiction. Everything leading up to the crime and everybody connected with it came from a metropolitan area in another state.
    “The police down there are cooperating with us all they can, but they’re shorthanded and overworked the same as everybody else, and every detective on the force has got his own backlog of unsolved cases as long as a whore’s dream. Our only chance is to keep questioning people, the same as we have been ever since it happened, till we locate somebody who saw that car that night, to get some kind of description of it, a place to start. Your father had an unlisted telephone number and a post office box address, so they had to ask somebody to find out where he lived.”
    Brubaker began to put the file back into the folder. There were several questions Romstead wanted to ask, but they could be answered by Bolling just as well or maybe better. “We’ll let you know when we come up with anything,” Brubaker concluded.
    Romstead stood up, and they shook hands. “Thanks for your time.”
    “Not at all. Incidentally, who’s the owner of that boat you were on?”
    “A man named Carroll Brooks. You can reach him at the Southland Trust Bank in San Diego.”
    Brubaker shrugged. “Just standard routine.”
    “No sweat.” Romstead went out and walked over to Aspen Street, trying to collect his thoughts. What in God’s name had the old man intended to do with a quarter million dollars in cash, even assuming he had that much in the first place? Why’d he bought a farm here, or ranch, or whatever it was, and then rented an apartment in San Francisco? The whole thing seemed to get murkier by the minute.
    * * *
    Bolling’s office was on the third floor of the Whittaker Building, a large corner room with windows on two sides. The desk was a massive one of some dark wood, the carpet was gray, and there were two leather armchairs. The walls were lined with identically bound volumes of an extensive law library. Bolling himself appeared to be well into his sixties, but erect, with a homely, angular face and sparse white hair. The eyes were a sharp and piercing blue. He smiled as he got up from behind the desk. “By God, you’re almost as big as he was.”
    “Not quite,” Romstead said.
    “Somehow I expected you to be darker, since your mother was Cuban, but you look exactly like