Murder Takes a Break Read Online Free Page A

He was a little bit more of a solid citizen than I was."
    "A time or two?"
    "Maybe three or four.   I wasn't counting."
    "Sure."  
    I didn't say anything for a few seconds.   Both of use stared at the porch.   Nameless sped across it in hot pursuit of something I couldn't see, maybe one of the geckos that lived in the bushes.   Or maybe it was nothing at all.   Maybe he was just running for the sheer joy of it, though he was getting a little old for that.
    "He's not exactly a solid citizen now," I said.   "Tack, that is."
    Dino nodded.   "He drinks a little.   But he's got money that he made the old fashioned way, in the West Texas oil fields.   His daddy was in the business to begin with, but it was Tack that hit it lucky.   He was just getting started when that oil shortage came along in the 'seventies."
    "No one mentioned a ransom note," I said.
    "There wasn't one.   This isn't a kidnapping, Tru. Something funny's going on."
    I had a strong sense of dèjà vu , and I thought again about the time Dino's daughter had disappeared.   I hadn't mentioned it the first time I thought of it, and I didn't mention it this time, either.
    "Maybe he just didn't want to go home again," I said.   "Lots of tension there."
    "You noticed."
    "Trained detective, remember?   We're observant as well as logical."
    "Right."
    There was something else very familiar about the situation, and it wasn't as touchy as the bit about Dino's daughter, not quite anyway, so I thought I might as well say something about it.
    "You know, getting involved with old girlfriends isn't always a good idea.   They might not be the way we remembered them."
    "Not everyone's like you, Tru.   In the first place, I'm not getting involved with an old girlfriend.   And in the second place, she's married.   And in the third place, I'm still seeing Evelyn."
    Evelyn was the mother of Dino's daughter.   She and Dino hadn't spoken in years, not until the daughter disappeared, but now they were slowly developing some kind of relationship.   I wasn't sure what kind.
    "I just wanted to be sure I knew where we stood," I said.
    "Well, now you know."
    "All right."   I got out of the car again.   "You want to come in?"
    "I think I'll go on home, work out a little.   Maybe watch a little TV."
    I knew he was eager to get back home.   He'd been out of the house a lot longer than he liked.   I tightened my grip on the copy of the police file as the breeze flapped my sweatshirt and ruffled my hair.   I smelled salt and sand and seaweed.
    "I'll call you," I said.
    "You do that."
    I shut the car door, and as I watched the big old Pontiac crunch away down the oyster-shell road, I wondered what I'd gotten myself into this time.

5
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    I' d been reading from a collection of John O'Hara's Gibbsville stories when Dino had come over to talk to me about the Kirbo disappearance.   Not too many people read O'Hara these days, which was part of his appeal to me.   The other part of his appeal was that he wrote good stories.
    I didn't go back to the stories, though, good as they were.   I had something else to read.   So I put the Kingston Trio's The Twelfth Month of the Year on the CD player and sat in the broken down recliner to look over the police report.
    Tack Kirbo had been right.   There wasn't much in it.   I could tell from reading it that the investigating officer, Bob Lattner, had never developed much interest in finding Randall Kirbo, no matter what Dino had said about the pressure on the police.   His interviews with Randall's friends were perfunctory at best, and he had simply accepted everything they said with hardly any probing or follow-up.   Oh, Lattner had tried to make things look good, all right; he'd checked several times to see if Randall had used his credit card, which he hadn't.   Lattner had even gone to Lubbock to do the interviews, but I could tell his heart wasn't in