Too Old a Cat (Trace 6) Read Online Free Page B

about one dull week. I have pooched around this city for a full week and found nothing more interesting than a woman with a low forehead and morals to match who knew the family and who took me by the hand and less public parts and showed me that the accident was indeed an accident. Stupid old Cap’n Bob couldn’t swim, and if you’re gonna go fishing from a boat, you should be able to swim or wear a life jacket.
    He didn’t, and now he is dead and his wife didn’t have anything to do with it, except perhaps to wish hard for such a happy ending.
    Damn. I really needed a murder.
    This has not been one of my real best weeks ever. A week in Kansas City to start with. And is that a stupid name for a city in Missouri? If you’re going to be in Missouri—and who the hell would want to be?—at least have the sense to call yourself Missouri City. Not Kansas City. I think there ought to be a federal commission to go around America renaming names. Like in New Jersey, North Bergen is south of Bergen County. Does that make any sense to anybody? Aaah, the hell with it. Nobody listens to me anyway. So I got a week here in Missouri City to start with and no crime to continue with and so no cut of what the insurance company would have saved to finish with. Now, if I had found out that the old lady had wrapped stupid Napier in ten-pound test nylon line and chucked him overboard, I would have saved the company two hundred thousand dollars and got a piece for myself. Now, all I get is my retainer and whatever I can steal on expenses. And how much could I steal here? What is there in Missouri City that you could pretend you spent money on?
    And where the hell is Chico? I’ve called the condo three times in the last week and she is never there. All I hear is my own voice on that stupid tape machine, and if I wanted to hear my own stupid voice on some stupid machine, I wouldn’t have to go to stupid Missouri City to do it.
    So Chico’s not around and that’s not helping my week either. I wonder if my father ever has weeks like this. Knowing my mother, I guess so. Sarge, I guess, has decades like this.
    I’m so depressed I don’t even feel like drinking. I feel like a damn businessman in a damn strange town and I’m not a businessman and I don’t want to be a businessman. I don’t like businessmen. The only one I think I’d like is whoever named that luggage Amelia Earhart luggage. Now, come on, is that the greatest name for luggage you’ve ever heard? Amelia Earhart luggage. Fifty years’ experience of being lost in transit. Now, there’s a guy I’d love. Him and the first person ever to call his eatery the Terminal Restaurant. And maybe that guy who runs a string of pizzerias named John’s and he advertises, “Women, if you’re tired of being stuck in the house, go cruising till you find John’s.” Great commercial. All the rest of the businessmen in the world you can have.
    So what was I talking about? Right, drinking. I can’t remember things anymore and I think I’m getting What’s-his-name’s disease. Drinking. Right. I used to think I was going to drink until I had tasted every kind of drink in the world.
    Well, did you ever see blue liqueur? I’ve been seeing that bottle of blue goo since I first started hanging out in saloons when I was a kid and I never saw anybody drink any of it. Actually, I think there’s only one bottle and they ship it around the country like a rotating trophy and every bar gets a chance to have it on the shelf for a while. Like a Christmas fruit cake. There’s only one of them in the entire country, but nobody ever eats it and they just keep mailing it around from family to family.
    Anyway, last night, the big breakthrough. I drank some of that blue liqueur. It tasted like blue liqueur, which is to say it tasted like dragon barf. It’s a big moment, though. Now, there’s nothing left in the world that I haven’t drunk, and if they don’t start inventing some new liquor pretty