You Bet Your Life: A Toby Peters Mystery (Book Three) Read Online Free Page A

Another hand grabbed my free arm, and I turned to see who was attached to it. It was a burly young cop in a dark blue coat and cap. He wasn’t smiling. He looked unhappy, cold, and a little angry. I figured that the punk had tried to nail me in Indianapolis, and the call had come ahead.
    “Yeah, I’m Peters,” I said, “and I’m cold. Can we go inside?”
    The fat lady with The Grapes of Wrath passed by us into the door. She saw the cop holding me and let out a triumphant trumpet, like a charging elephant I had once seen in a Tarzan movie. The elephant spewed out clouds of mist in the crisp cold air and disappeared forever.
    The red nosed guy let go of my arm and nodded as if my request were reasonable. We pushed through the door and started up a concrete stairway.
    “Welcome to Chicago,” he said.

2
     
    The waiting room of the station had a high ceiling and was filled with wooden benches. It was a church with all the pews facing a big ad for Woodbury soap. There were a few people on the benches, but they weren’t worshipping the soap for the skin you love to touch. Some were sleeping. Some were reading. Most were looking at each other, or nowhere.
    The two cops led me slowly around the benches toward a short order counter that jutted out on one side of the hall and sent out a smell of sweet grease. There were lots of stools open. The plainclothes cop pointed to the one I should take. It had a piece of yellow food on it. He swept it away and waited for me to sit. The cops sat on either side of me. A semicatatonic woman sat next to the plainclothes cop, drinking yellow coffee and silently gnawing a sodden sweetroll.
    I put my suitcase by my feet and watched a lemon-shaped waitress bring yellow coffee for the three of us without being asked. The cops were waiting for me to say something. I was waiting for them. I’d been a cop once and I’d stepped into mistakes often enough to know that you kept your mouth shut with cops until you had to talk.
    “My name’s Kleinhans,” said the red-nosed guy, “Sergeant Kleinhans. You can call me Chuck or Kleinhans, whatever suits you. The gentleman on your right is Officer Jackson. You can call him Officer Jackson. Officer Jackson is about to take his coffee to that seat over there where he can be alone with his thoughts.”
    I shut up and drank my coffee from a thick, porcelin cup with a big handle. The coffee didn’t taste bad. It had no taste. My cup was more interesting. It had a branching crack in it. I followed the crack with my eyes and let the steam of the coffee hit my face. Kleinhans gripped his cup in two hands.
    “Hot cup against your palm on a cold night feels good,” he said. I put on a wry grin and nodded my head knowingly. Kleinhans went on talking very softly into his cup without looking up at me.
    “We got a call about you from Miami,” he said. “Well, anyway, my boss got a call. Seems you’re here to check up on something involving some of our good friends in the criminal world.”
    I was ready to say something, but having started, Kleinhans wanted to finish his piece.
    “I work out of the Maxwell Street Station not too far from here,” he went on, savoring the feel of hot porcelin in his hands. “I sort of specialize in gambling problems related to the citizens in question. Would you like a roll?”
    I said no, but that I would like some cereal. The waitress brought him a cheese Danish and me a bowl of what looked like Rice Krispies. Crumbs fell from Kleinhans’ sugary Danish. He swept them off with the back of his arm. They snowed on the catatonic woman. She didn’t complain.
    “Maybe we can be of service to each other,” Kleinhans went on. “I’ll tell you how to get in touch with certain people, and you keep me informed about what you find out. Now this isn’t exactly the way I’d play it with you if I had my way, but my boss says to treat you right. You’ve got connections. And who knows? You might come up with something I can