The Big Bad City Read Online Free Page B

with the unidentified corpse on it, and she looked down at the face and said, “Yes, that’s Mary Vincent,” and went outside to vomit.
    First thing you had to understand about this city was that it was big. It was difficult to explain to someone who came from Overall Patches, Indiana, that youcould take his entire town and tuck it into one tiny corner of the smallest of the city’s five separate sectors and still have room left over for the entire bustling municipalities of Two Trees, Wyoming, and Sleepy Sheep, South Dakota.
    This city was dangerous, too. That was the next thing you had to know about it. Never mind the reassuring bulletins from the Mayor’s office. Ask the Mayor to take an unescorted two A.M. stroll through any of the city’s barren moonscapes and then interview him in his hospital bed the next morning to ask him about lower crime rates and improved police patrols. Or just watch the first ten minutes of the eleven o’clock news every night and you’ll learn in the wink of an eye exactly what the people of this city were capable of doing to other people in this city. It was on last night’s eleven o’clock news that the story of the unidentified dead nun had first been broadcast to a populace accustomed to news of dead people turning up in Dumpsters or abandoned bathtubs. Bad things happened in this city every hour of the day or night, and they happened all
over
the city.
    So if you came here thinking, Gee, there’s going to be a neat little murder takes place in a town house and some blue-haired lady will solve it in her spare time when she isn’t tending her rose garden, then you came to the wrong city at the wrong time of the year. In this city, you had to pay attention. In this city, things were happening all the time, all over the place, and you didn’t have to be a detective to smell evil in the wind.
    She had come home from work yesterday evening to find that her apartment had been “robbed,” as she’dput it when she phoned the police. The two responding uniformed cops informed her that the correct expression was “burglarized,” as if that made a damn bit of difference, and then asked her a lot of dumb questions about “access” and “vulnerability,” which she supposed meant Who has a key to the front door and Which window opens onto a fire escape? And now—only a day late and a dollar short—here were two plain-clothes detectives asking the same dumb questions. Her best friend, Sylvia, whose apartment had been broken into last year around this time, told her that there wasn’t a single recorded instance in this city of the cops ever catching who did it or ever recovering the stolen goods, it was all a waste of time and taxpayers’ money. But here they were at twenty minutes to one on the day after the burglary, when she had a hundred Saturday afternoon errands to run.
    “We’re sorry to bother you,” the bald one was saying. She was sure he’d introduced himself as Meyer Meyer, but that couldn’t be a person’s
name
, could it? He was a tall, burly man wearing pale blue trousers and a lightweight sports jacket, the collar of his shirt open and worn
outside
the jacket collar, the way teenagers in America used to wear it in the forties and the way Russian gangsters wore it today, from pictures she had seen in
Life
magazine.
    “What time did you get home from work last night?” the blond one asked. He was very good-looking, if you cared for apple pie and chocolate milk midwestern shit-kicking looks, an inch or so taller than his partner, just as wide in the shoulders, both of them in their mid-to late thirties, she supposed, which made them both too young for her, not that she was interested.Annie Kearnes was forty-two years old, almost to the day, since her birthday had been last Tuesday, August eighteenth, a Leo as she was proud of telling first dates. Annie went on a lot of first dates. She wondered if either of these two boring gentlemen was married, though police