Requiem for a Realtor Read Online Free

me to answer that. That is why it would be best if you both came together.”
    â€œHe wouldn’t listen to you.”
    â€œBut you don’t know what I would say.”
    She was confused. She no longer regarded him as an ally against outrageous fortune. “I think I can guess what he would have said.”
    â€œIf you came together there would be no need of guessing.”
    For a half hour they hashed over what she had said, while Father Dowling considered that she provided him with a reason for believing her husband’s accusations. Would she have invented her accusations against Stanley? He couldn’t think so. The two of them had gotten themselves into a mess, a mess to which David Jameson had suggested a legalistic solution. A little learning is a dangerous thing indeed. Canon law assumed the theology of marriage, without which it was merely a set of rules. And David Jameson had obviously become an interested party as he dispensed his ill-digested lore to the weeping wife. What a solution he must have seemed to Phyllis. And to himself.
    Finally she left, her tale having been told, if not with the upshot she must have expected. Father Dowling returned to his study and lit his pipe and reviewed the session with Phyllis Collins. There was a tap at the door and Marie Murkin looked in.
    â€œI thought she had gone.”
    â€œAs you see.”
    Marie waited expectantly, but she could not really think he would tell her about Phyllis’s visit.
    â€œShe was certainly all dolled up.”
    â€œWas she?”
    â€œWhy don’t people dress their age?”
    â€œHave I ever complained?”
    Marie stiffened. “About what?”
    â€œNever mind.”
    â€œNo, tell me.”
    â€œI was thinking of clerical clothes, Marie. The same in youth and middle age and afterward.”
    â€œOh.” She tugged her coat sweater about her.
    â€œI like that sweater.”
    â€œThis old thing?”
    â€œThere is something clerical about it.”
    â€œIf you don’t want to tell me, don’t.”
    â€œBut I just did.”
    After she left, he felt remorse. He had to curb his teasing of Marie. She was a good woman. At the moment her solid predictability seemed the rock on which civilization was raised.

6
    Bob Oliver had come late to journalism, or vice versa. He had tried sales, even real estate after punishing months spent cramming for the licence exams, but all he had gained was a bad joke. “I specialize in houses and lots. Bawdy houses and lots of beer.” Ho, ho. He didn’t have the buddy-buddy gift of his brother-in-law, Stanley. Eventually, he had sense enough to get out of a line of work where he would always run a distant second to Stanley. One Realtor in a family is enough anyway. He went into food and found it boring. Finally, he parlayed his college English major into a job at the Fox River Tribune. Not much of a job, but it sounded important. Even Stanley was impressed.
    â€œWhy don’t you write a piece on Stanley?” Phyllis urged him.
    â€œToo much like incest.”
    Incest was one thing Stanley wasn’t guilty of, but only because he had no sister. Phyllis seemed totally unaware of her husband’s reputation.
    Bob did drop by the agency to see if there was any way he could write the story. The only one in the office when he got there was Susan Sawyer, and she responded to the possibility of a story on the agency with such enthusiasm that Bob never got around to telling her he was the brother of her husband’s partner. Thought of that way, it seemed pretty remote anyway.
    â€œOf course, you’d have to focus on George.” She gave him a meaningful look. “Some partners are partners in name only.”
    He had taken that to be a remark on her marriage, and that made him more vulnerable to her charms than he might otherwise have been.
    After she gave him a tour of the office, she put a hand on his arm. “This is not