The Third Figure Read Online Free

progress of the car, it seemed as if the figures inside were part of some strange procession, traveling to some dim and distant place.

2
    I AWOKE SATURDAY MORNING to a feeling of apprehension. Over coffee, glumly, my thoughts kept returning to the legend of Faust, irrevocably selling his soul to the devil.
    By the second cup of coffee I’d decided to write out a check to Mrs. Vennezio for a thousand dollars, mail it and forget it.
    An hour later I’d packed, got an airline reservation for later that afternoon and notified my long-suffering city editor that I’d be out of town for a few days.
    It was ultimately a reporter’s overwhelming curiosity, I realized, that had compelled the decision. Although I’d been lucky enough, over the past few years, to solve a few well-publicized murders by the painful process of groping among the dark and confusing images of my subconscious, yet I was nevertheless primarily a professional crime reporter. Even though my employer’s publicity department took great pains to ballyhoo the mysterious methods of their “clairvoyant sleuth of the mind,” it was actually conventional news-gathering techniques that provided me with the disembodied lines and shapes from which, with luck, the final subconscious images unaccountably emerged.
    And so, as a newspaperman, I had no choice but to go down to Los Angeles and talk with Frankie Russo. Beyond doubt, I would never be able to write directly about the conversation. Yet, also beyond doubt, I would never be able to forgive myself if I surrendered the opportunity to interview one of the kingpins of organized crime in America.
    In the meantime, I had three spare hours. After some deliberation, I decided to try and reach Captain George Larsen, chief of the Detective Bureau’s homicide division. A long, laconic Dane with a quick wit and a wry sense of humor, Larsen had been the first police department official to treat me as anything more than a witch doctor disguised in a Harris tweed suit. Later, as we’d come to know each other better, we’d become friends.
    Larsen was off duty, and at first I was reluctant to call him at home. Friendship is one thing, Saturday afternoons something else. Yet I was also reluctant to depart for Los Angeles without at least touching base with the law, and an interview with Larsen at home was much more appealing than one at headquarters.
    Luckily, Larsen was working on his boat in the garage, and his wife was delivering an angel food cake to her church bazaar. I would therefore be welcome, if I didn’t mind inhaling resin fumes and helping with the fiber glass.
    And so, shortly after noon, I found myself holding a roll of glass fiber and watching Larsen as he smoothed out a section of freshly applied resin.
    “You should open that window,” I said, moving my head toward the back of the garage. “You need some cross-ventilation.”
    “It won’t open. Besides, this is the last I’m going to do. I have to take Carrie downtown as soon as she gets home.” He dropped a length of the glass fiber into the resin. “Hand me that squeegee, will you?”
    I handed it over, then glanced at my watch. I’d been holding glass fiber and handing over tools for more than a half hour, while waiting my chance to bring up the subject of Dominic Vennezio. But Larsen, muttering constantly about a bad batch of resin that was setting too quickly, had been preoccupied.
    Now, finally, he dropped the squeegee into a nearby bucket of solvent.
    “Let’s go inside and get some coffee,” he said, leading the way. “These fumes are something.”
    I poured the coffee from a pot on the stove while Larsen set out sugar and cream on the small kitchen table
    “Well, what can I do for you?” he asked, sipping the coffee and for the first time giving me his full attention.
    I paused a moment, conscious of savoring the sensation I was about to produce.
    “Dominic Vennezio’s widow wants me to find out who killed her husband.”
    He sipped