Grist 06 - The Bone Polisher Read Online Free Page A

you with you, stop picking up street kids.”
    “I’m safe,” he repeated.
    “Christopher doesn’t think so.”
    Max drained his unsweetened lemonade and gave me an encouraging look. “Maybe Christy knows more about what kind of danger I’m in than he told you.”
    It wasn’t the first time he’d surprised me. “I considered that.”
    “A cynic like you, I’m sure you did.”
    “And I didn’t know then that he had a lifetime habit of ripping off older men.”
    “Well, now you do.”
    I replayed my conversation with Christopher Nordine. “I think he cares about you,” I said.
    “And so do I, about him. But a sociopath—you know about sociopaths?”
    “I’ve met a few.”
    He beamed at me. “Interesting, aren’t they? They can hold two completely conflicting views simultaneously. Like politicians. Or saints.”
    “The multiple murderer Emil Kemper,” I said. “Talking to the psychiatrists, he said, ‘When I meet a pretty girl, part of me is saying what an interesting girl. I’d really like to get to know her. And part of me is wondering how her head would look on a stick.’ ”
    “I don’t think Christy wants to see my head on a stick,” Max Grover said seriously.
    “Probably not. Emil Kemper was a special guy.”
    “But still, let’s say Christy wants to kill me. Let’s say part of him says, ‘Oh, I love Max. He’s been so good to me.’ And another part of him is saying, ‘That disgusting old man, there’s nothing but his rotting body between me and his money.’”
    “You don’t believe that.”
    “Of course not. But think about it. First he hires a detective to tell me that my life could be in danger, and then he kills me. A self-fulfilling prophecy. Like most prophecies, actually; prophecies are no big deal. Makes him look good, wouldn’t you say?”
    “Especially since he’d be the obvious suspect.”
    “The will,” Max Grover said. “He told you about the will?”
    “First thing.”
    “Very prompt of him. A bit Victorian, the will. Still, people have killed for less.”
    “But, as I said, you don’t believe it.”
    Grover rattled the ice cubes in his glass and pressed its sweating surface against his cheek. “Not at all.”
    “Then why bring it up?”
    He wiped the moisture from his cheek and dried his hand on his blue shirt and smiled at me again. “I’m just having fun,” he said. Then he reached out the bejeweled hand and tapped me on the knee. “I see a wedding in your future.”
    I fingered the ring in my pocket. “You certainly do,” I said.

3 ~ Point-Blank
Lohengrin
     
    Weddings seemed to be the theme of the day.
    I’d grabbed the latest batch of mail on my way down the driveway to the car, and I thumbed through it as I sat outside Max Grover’s house, waiting for a breath of relatively cool air to bumble into the car through the open windows. It came as no surprise that marriage was a profitable enterprise for what economists like to call service industries—travel agents, department stores, florists, insurance companies—but I’d never realized what a boon it was for paper manufacturers and four-color printers.
    YOU TIE THE KNOT, WE’LL GIVE THE BASH, prodded a group of professional merrymakers based in Santa Monica, couching their message in words of one syllable, thoughtfully printed in type big enough to read through cement. People of many ethnic backgrounds and several religions celebrated with decorous abandon in the accompanying color photographs. In one shot, the female guests were wearing saris: market research at work. YOUR MARRIAGE WILL LAST FOREVER, predicted another brochure optimistically; SHOULDN’T YOUR PHOTOS? This one was hawking a sort of stainless-steel album that would preserve the visual record of your nuptials against fire, flood, earthquake, and, by implication, atomic attack.
    A third, less romantically, urged me to give thought to a prenuptial agreement. “All of us at Schindler & Spink share your joy at having found