Peeper Read Online Free Page B

gotten around to it yet. The morning was overcast and the wide streets had that granite look they took on just before a rain. As he navigated his way around the abandoned cars and construction barricades, he thought about the explosion in Lyla Dane’s apartment. The building had had gas leaks before, but he kept coming back to Carpenter and how he had refused to explain what he did for Bishop Steelcase, and that last trip upstairs without Ralph. Coincidence, that’s the dick’s best friend , old Gus Lovechild had said once. When your client’s husband and his secretary check into the same motel ten minutes apart, that bonus is as good as in your pocket . Except for that time with Judge Morganthaler and a file clerk from the Frank Murphy Hall of Justice, that is; which had been a coincidence. It had taken six months and a thousand dollars in an envelope addressed to a state police commander to get back Gus’s investigator’s license. But the rule was sound.
    Still chewing over it, Ralph parked in a handicapped zone near the building on Michigan Avenue and spent a moment looking through the printed placards he kept in the glove compartment before selecting one that read VISITING PRIEST , which he thought appropriate. He clipped it to the sun visor so it could be read through the windshield and went inside.
    The gilt lettering on the glass doors to the floor where he worked read LOVECHILD CONFIDENTIAL INQUIRIES . Beyond them the reception room was painted in rose and lavender on alternating walls with Lautrec prints hung on them in glass frames. The marble coffee table by the chairs and sofa supported current issues of Vogue, GQ , and Architectural Digest , and hidden stereo speakers piped Bach and Mozart into the room. It was impressive, but Ralph missed the old mustard-colored office with EAGLE EYE DETECTIVE AGENCY flaking off the window and geriatric copies of National Geographic , the African issues, on the yellow library table. Behind the kidney-shaped desk sat a receptionist with hair like a cloud of platinum powder and daggerlike nails painted fiery red.
    â€œâ€™Morning, Anita,” Ralph said. “I guess you got to be real careful when you use toilet paper. You could bleed to death.”
    She didn’t look up from her copy of Working Woman . “Mrs. Lovechild wants to see you.”
    â€œWhat’s she want this time, my body?”
    â€œJust your testicles. She said to send in that asshole as soon as he decides to show up.”
    â€œHow’d you know she meant me?”
    â€œA business is like a pair of pants. It can only have one asshole in it at a time.” She turned the page.
    He leaned over the desk and lowered his voice to a gruff whisper. “I hear the Alamo Hotel on East Jefferson is running a lunchtime special: fifty minutes for five bucks.”
    She looked up from her magazine for the first time, smiled, and aimed one of her nails at his good eye. “How’d you like to hustle pencils for the rest of your life?”
    â€œBroads. Never a straight answer.” He shrugged and went through the door behind the desk.
    In the short pastel hallway that led to Lucille Lovechild’s office, Ralph’s personality underwent a change. He straightened his necktie, took off his hat, and smoothed back his hair, which flopped forward again as soon as he took away his hand. Holding the hat, he tapped softly on the door with the occupant’s name on it engraved in a brass plate. He remembered the matchstick he was chewing and put it in a pocket.
    â€œCome in, Poteet.”
    The office was twice as large as the reception room and decorated much less gaily, with a gray-and-white carpet, woodgrain paneling, and framed community-service citations on the walls. Windows on the north and east sides looked out on Washington Boulevard and Woodward Avenue. The only thing feminine in sight—and that included Lucille Lovechild herself—was a spray of