Murder Miscalculated Read Online Free Page A

use, and our very slow renovation of the building had yet to reach this floor except for two rooms at the front that Lynn and I had remodeled into a small bedroom suite. Barbara’s own bedroom was downstairs off the kitchen, harkening back to when she’d lived here alone.
    Halfway down the hall I pushed open a door whose hinges squeaked their need for oil. I fumbled on the wall for the light switch. It clicked loudly, and a single bare bulb in the ceiling lit up and illuminated a small, windowless room. Faded posters covered what wallpaper remained. The air smelled of dust, old clothes and time.
    In the center of the room was what I was looking for, an old dressmaker’s dummy that kept a lonely vigil over a clutter of dilapidated trunks and stacks of sagging cardboard boxes.
    I draped the sports coat I was carrying around the dummy’s shoulders, then stood back and contemplated it. It stood much too low to the floor for my purpose. I dragged a trunk over, picked up the dummy and placed it on top. My hands were covered in dust from the trunk and the dummy, and I wiped them off on an old shirt lying on top of one of the boxes. As I put the shirt back down I wondered whose it was and when it had last been worn.
    I looked at the dummy again. Now it was a little too high, but it was good enough for what I needed.
    I shook my head. If only Fast Eddie Dupre could see me having to go back to the basics. My guess is he’d be cackling that loopy laugh of his.
    “No, not like that. Smooth, smooth like the way a copperhead glides through the swamp.”  Eddie took my wrist and pulled it back from the dummy wearing the coat. We were in the basement of his cheap apartment building. I was fifteen, a street kid who thought he was a pickpocket. Eddie had offered to take me under his wing and teach me the ancient art of picking pockets. “Now watch me,” he commanded. I watched.
    Eddie was in his early fifties back then, slicked-back black hair on the long side, handsome face showing his Cajun heritage and a body beginning to show the ravages of a life lived on the wrong side of the street. He took a few steps back and then walked across the basement as if going for a stroll on Bourbon Street in his native New Orleans. He glanced up at the dingy, pipe-lined ceiling as though admiring a cloudless, sunny sky. He looked to one side and waved and smiled at someone, perhaps a lady friend from his long-ago youth. He whistled a little, and then, when he was a few steps past the dummy, he stopped and turned and held up a wallet for me to see. It was the wallet I’d placed in the pocket of the jacket just a minute before.
    “I never saw you take it,” I said, amazed. “I was watching you the whole time, and I never saw you take it.”
    “You are wrong, my young friend. You thought you were watching me the whole time but I can guarantee you weren’t. Otherwise you’d have seen me do the dip.” He smiled at the confusion on my face. “Think back carefully, and then do what I did exactly, step by step.”
    I went over to the dark stone wall where Eddie had started and waited while he replaced the wallet in the jacket on the dummy. I took a step and stopped. “You want me to imitate the way you walked? I don’t think I can.”
    “Sure you can, Kid. Think about how I held myself and how I moved.”
    I closed my eyes for a moment, visualizing Eddie’s walk. Then I opened my eyes and began walking, swinging my arms a bit, sauntering as best I could the way Eddie had sauntered down his imaginary street.
    “Stop,” Eddie commanded. I froze in place. “You’ve got the walk and you’ve got the arms, but what about my head. What was my head doing while I walked?”
    “You were looking from side to side,” I answered.
    “Then go back and start again and do the same.”
    I went back and started again, wondering if I was crazy for thinking this old guy could teach me to be a master pickpocket.
    I gave it another try. I walked like Eddie