The Sundown Speech Read Online Free Page A

looking around. Everything else had probably been there when he moved in. No caller ID on the cordless telephone, but I punched redial. The little screen on the handset gave me an exchange and number I didn’t recognize. I hung up before anyone answered; I had to know a lot more before I spoke to whoever it was. I wrote the number in my notebook.
    I let the computer alone. I don’t know anything about them.
    I realized I was breathing through my mouth. The room seemed to stink worse than when I’d entered. I felt the same drop in temperature I’d felt then.
    There was one more place to look.
    It was a narrow door hinged to a compartment built into the wall to hold an ironing board. I pulled it open and stepped back, but no board swung out. Neither did Jerry Marcus. He was stuffed in too tight for that, and stiff as the blood in his curly hair. The bullet hadn’t done anything for his boyish good looks.

 
    FOUR
    I looked at the watch on his right wrist. It was intact: No smashed face, no time of death. I didn’t search the body. There were people who got paid to do that sort of handling.
    I spent the time looking the room over with new eyes. The carpet had stood more abuse than one tenant could provide; I detected several generations of cats, and a string of keggers reaching back to the old Stroh’s plant.
    Other stains were more recent. Splinters of what looked like fine china clung to a dark elliptical blotch the size of a dessert dish. I’d seen that circular fragment pattern before. It said someone had forced Marcus into a prone position, probably on his stomach, and shot him execution style at close range; the fragments were pieces of skull. But there were people who were paid to spend more time on that too. I was satisfied he’d been killed in the room and his body jammed into the cupboard to slow down discovery.
    Other items in the mess were harder to explain. What at first appeared to be more bits of skull turned out to be soft and springy when I picked one up and pressed it between thumb and forefinger. Styrofoam. It looked as if someone with nervous fingers had shredded his coffee cup during intense conversation. The problem with that was it could have happened at any time and had nothing to do with murder. I shook the piece loose and let it fall.
    That was it for the crime scene. Others with the right tools could sift through what I hadn’t the training or patience for, and the sooner the better.
    Clues, phooey. A shred of tobacco, a candy wrapper, a footprint in the dust, bits of red clay unique to El Valle de los Dios in Quetzaltenango, a moustache follicle, a drop of sweat from Custer’s left nut, preserved in a plastic case like an Indian-head penny; they’re all significant, or all irrelevant, or some combination of both; close your eyes and stab a finger and follow it up. When Inspector Finch-Hatton is on the case, a half-eaten peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich can crack it wide open. Settle for a sleuth named Walker, and it’s just somebody’s leftovers.
    Most often it’s a break in an established pattern of behavior, a slip of the tongue in conversation, a shadow in the wrong place in a picture taken at a certain time on a certain day; something as intangible as a memory you might only have dreamt, and that slips away as easily. An analyst’s couch is a more useful tool in the work than a dustpan and a magnifying glass.
    I hovered over the cordless phone, then lifted the receiver and pecked out 911. My prints were already on it and the cops could yell at me only so loud.
    The operator repeated the word “murder” as if she were taking an order for lunch. They’re all the same, even in a town where the occasional break-in was page one news; all the emotion of a white-noise machine running on a low battery.
    After I hung up I went back downstairs and out to the porch. The bald girl was in the same position, balancing the plastic cup