Suicide King (The Jake Samson & Rosie Vicente Detective Series) Read Online Free

taste. I’m surprised at you.”
    Pamela gave him a lazy-eyed look that spoke of infinite boredom.
    “They do a great show, don’t they?”
    “Pam,” he said, “this is not funny.”
    “Noel,” she said, “it’s not supposed to be. When you produce a show, you can do it your way.” She nodded toward the stage. “People like them, they’re good, and we’re trying to raise money.” It was true. The audience was clearly crazy about Three Mile Island. I thought they were great.
    “I don’t produce shows.”
    Again, she gave him the lazy-eyed look, but this time with one raised eyebrow. For a woman who appeared to be under thirty, she was very good at the decades-of-disdain expression.
    Noel grunted and stalked off again. Three Mile Island finished their set and announced an intermission. Rosie got into a conversation with someone and wandered off again, toward the punch, probably.
    With perfect timing— was he waiting in the entry?— Joe Richmond appeared at the door and the crowd turned like a sheet in the wind to face the back of the room. He waved his hands, smiled, called out a few greetings, a few names, and was swallowed up in the enthusiasm of his partisans. Pam was smiling, but she didn’t join the mob.
    “Impressive man,” I said. I felt like I had to say something, and “impressive” was the first word that came to mind.
    “You don’t sound impressed,” she said.
    “I am. As an observer. I was also impressed by your performance. Very moving. But I’m curious about something.”
    She cocked her head charmingly and waited for me to go on.
    “How does it happen that someone your age does that particular fifties look so well?”
    She laughed. “I do it better than most, don’t I? I may be the only one in the folk revival that tries so hard to be authentic. I guess you could say it’s just part of my act. But I learned it from a good teacher. My mother was Elmira Sutherland.”
    It took me a second. “Oh,” I said stupidly.
“The
Elmira Sutherland?”
    Who was an old-time folksinger and writer of protest and satire songs. She did most of her best work in the fifties, but she wasn’t widely known then because a lot of her songs got somehow preempted by the male folksingers of her day. Her particular legend came briefly alive again in the late sixties and early seventies, with proper credits at last. Then, I thought I recalled, she died. And Pam had said her mother “was.”
    “She was a great woman,” I said. “She wrote some great songs. I remember.”
    “Thank you,” Pam said simply. “She was involved in some great demonstrations, too. One of them killed her.”
    Now
that
I didn’t remember. I didn’t remember Elmira Sutherland dying in a demonstration. I shook my head, puzzled.
    Pam explained. “In the early fifties, a bunch of artists and musicians went out to the desert to protest a nuclear test. They must have been too close to the test site. Every one of them is dead now.”
    “A lot of them must have gotten pretty old,” I protested.
    “They all died of cancer. Lung, mostly.”
    I didn’t know what to say to that. For a beautiful person, with a beautiful talent, Pam was pretty damned depressing. I thought she was carrying the Beat image just a little far. I looked away, uncomfortable, and saw Joe Richmond coming toward me, smiling.
    Turned out that he was smiling at Pam.
    She returned the smile and I felt a moment’s jealousy, automatically trying to gauge the degree of intimacy.
    He put his arm around her shoulder and gave her a quick, friendly hug.
    “Everyone says it’s a great show, Pam. Thanks.” He turned toward me, looking sociable.
    “This is Jake Samson. Jake, Joe Richmond. Jake’s an observer, Joe.”
    He laughed. “Good. Glad to hear it. How do you feel about what you’ve been observing, Jake?”
    I decided to tell him the truth. “I think your ideas make a lot of sense. But politics is politics, isn’t it? Doesn’t the term imply coming to an