Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow? Read Online Free Page B

from her paperback. "Hey, it's the gumshoe."
        Helen loved hard-boiled talk. She wore a flowered housedress, pince-nez reading glasses, pancake makeup that looked like real batter, and lipstick that told me she hadn't been wearing eyeglasses when she'd put it on. "Sit down and take a load off."
        "Thanks."
        "So how you be, shamus?"
        "Pretty good, I guess."
        "Any damsels in your life?"
        "Not so's you'd notice."
        She paused, then waggled the paperback at me. "Hammer's in big trouble. Commies. And they've got Velda."
        "Let me know how it comes out."
        She frowned at the glass sitting next to her cleaned-up luncheon plate. "All they serve in this joint is iced tea. What a gal wouldn't give for a shot of the real stuff."
        "Real stuff?"
        "Pepsi."
        "Ah."
        "Doctor said it's got too much acid for my stomach." She dog-eared the book. "A stoolie gets lonely, gumshoe. Here you are, six or seven times the last couple months, making the rounds, and you don't visit your favorite stoolie."
        "I'll try and do better. I promise."
        A melancholy came over her wide white face. She looked teary. "Husband's birthday today. He woulda been eighty-eight."
        "I'm sorry."
        "Had this damn thing on his neck. Big ugly thing. Kept telling me it was a goiter. Goiter my foot, I said. Took me three years to get him to the doc's and by then it was too late. I shoulda pushed him more." She was starting to cry. That was one reason I didn't visit her as often as I once did. She phased in and out of the past. Sometimes it seemed to attack her.
        "Did I ever tell you that before? About that thing on Fred's neck?"
        "I think you mentioned it once or twice, Helen."
        She sighed. "I ever tell you why he married me?"
        "I don't think so." She had, of course. Many times.
        "I was the Corn Queen of 'Twenty-nine. I ever show you a picture of me back then?"
        "Yeah. Once."
        "I was somethin'." She really had been something. But time is never kind.
        "But even with bein' Corn Queen and all, I still had to chase him. He didn't chase me. Oh, no. Wasn't a gal in the whole county who hadn't cocked their hats for him. He'd inherited better'n nine hundred acres from his dad and didn't owe a dime on 'em. And he was good-lookin' besides. You think the gals weren't after him?"
        "I'm sure they were."
        "He married me because I could sing, he said. His mom had this old piano, and she'd been dead a long time and nobody had sung in the house for years. So one day I was out there and I sat down at the piano and sang some of the popular songs, and that's when he said he fell in love with me. We had three kids, and his favorite nights were when we'd all get around the piano and sing." She choked back sudden tears. "I kept tellin' him and tellin' him about that damn thing on his neck. But he just wouldn't do anything about it."
        I gave her my white handkerchief. She turned a good deal of it damp. I told her to keep it. I said, "Feel like playing stool pigeon?"
        She grinned. "Sure, gumshoe."
        "You hear any word on Richard Conners?"
        "What kind of word?"
        "That somebody might want to hurt him."
        "A lot of people want to hurt him."
        "Like who?"
        "Jeff and that crowd. They're trying to get him kicked off the Trawler faculty."
        "Anybody else but that bunch?"
        "You'd think they'd be proud of him. He's the most prominent man ever come from this town. I don't agree with his politics, but I'm proud of him anyway." She spoke for the majority of citizens, I'm sure. Then, as if the question had just now registered: "I haven't heard of anybody trying to get him, though. 'Less it'd be a husband."
        "A husband?"
        "Our Richard gets around."
        "He does?"
        "Do I have to draw you a picture?"
        "You