You Know Who Killed Me Read Online Free

saying you’re Walker, and nobody’ll ever know who took that money.”
    â€œYou just screw yourself into bed every night, don’t you?”
    â€œI wasn’t born this way, pal.”
    â€œThey’d know at Christ Church who took the money. But after you make those calls—and the numbers are easy enough to check, in case you think they belong to accomplices—we’ll meet, and I’ll show you my bona fides. What’ve you got to lose?”
    â€œNot my job, that’s for sure.” He took my numbers, home, office, cell, and the call was over.
    *   *   *
    I tried three more numbers from the record, got a recording, no answer, and a harried-sounding woman with children slaughtering each other in the background who told me her husband wouldn’t be home till six. I thanked her and said I’d call then. I didn’t leave my name or any message.
    I opened the folder again. Christ Episcopal Church, the Gateses’ place of worship, had stood near downtown Detroit since 1863. Its current pastor was Florence Melville.
    My ear was sore from holding the receiver against it. A little face-to-face spirituality is never a bad idea.
    When I put the cordless phone back in its cradle in the living room, the card the tough little blond doctor had given me poked out from under the standard. It belonged to a private therapist in Redford Township; but it wasn’t the time to make good on the deal.
    The Cutlass’s cold engine turned over twice and caught. On the way to the river I saw another “YOU KNOW WHO KILLED ME!” billboard, Donald Gates smiling in his festive sweater. I might have seen it before, but only through a cloud that still hadn’t quite passed.
    The sign didn’t mention the reward, but it was the widow behind the advertising, not the church.
    I peeled the cigarette I’d just lit from my lip, wound the window down two inches, and poked it into the slipstream. It had all the flavor of a toothpick. My belly ached and the “Jingle Bells” dogs were barking in my head. You know you’re going to survive when you least feel like it.
    I paralleled the chalk-gray water until I got to Rivard and swung into the parking lot next to the old pile.
    The churches are almost all that’s left from the days before Henry Ford, and there isn’t much left from those days either. The city is North America’s leading manufacturer of vacant lots. Christ Episcopal has loads of spiked railings for pigeons to curl their toes around and a belfry screaming for bats and plenty of them. It’s probably haunted. All the self-respecting spirits have moved out of city hall.
    There was no service in progress. In the echoing nave, a novice or whatever he was stopped pushing his carpet sweeper to direct me to the rectory. I went that way, smelling candle wax, furniture oil, and dust. I’d been raised Episcopalian, but had drifted. It was the first time in many years I felt the urge to genuflect. I resisted; the saints in the alcoves were watching, and they didn’t get there by being gullible. The non-martyrs, anyway.
    I needed a battering ram to make sure my knock would be heard on the other side of the rectory door, but after a second a voice called out for me to enter. The door swung open easily on a system of counterweights or something and I eased it shut behind me. The ceiling was high enough to vanish beyond reach of the sunlight coming through the leaded-glass window. Gray as it was, the light was still bright enough to blur the figure sitting at a desk in front of it.
    The desk itself resembled a beached Spanish galleon, all beveled panels and carved laurels, with a red leather top. There was plenty of red in that room, in the deep rug framed all around by eight inches of polished floor, in a dim gilt-bordered painting of some bloody biblical battle leaning out from the wall on guy wires, and in a bronze pen stand studded with