Evil in the 1st House Read Free Page B

up to date. I’ll talk to you before Saturday.” She stood up.
    Lowell pushed his chair back away from the desk. “Oh, there is one more little detail I should mention.”
    â€œWhat’s that?”
    â€œDr. Williamson gave me a briefcase with a million dollars in hundred-dollar bills as a retainer.”
    â€œThis definitely ups the ‘unusual’ quotient.”

Chapter Three
    As always, David Lowell awoke at five. He showered and dressed in his usual blue jeans pressed to a sharp crease, a lightweight turtleneck, gray today, and loafers. Then he left his townhouse on East Ninety-third Street and walked down to his offices on East Twenty-fourth as was his habit since he opened the Starlight Detective Agency almost eight years before. This was the only time of the day he could call his own. No clients screaming for his attention, no traumas or distractions. It was a meditative ritual that allowed him to clear his head and prepare for the day’s action. He stopped at a Starbucks to pick up his first cup of the day and strolled leisurely downtown.
    Each day he took a different route. This time he walked down Museum Mile: the Guggenheim, in its circular glory, Frank Lloyd Wright’s twisted amusement park of visual delights. Then he passed the magnificent Met, the largest art museum in America, its stately, imposing steps leading to one of the greatest collections of human endeavors. With its Beaux-Arts façade a quarter of a mile long, and covering almost two million square feet, it beckoned with creative works from all corners of the globe.
    He passed the mansions of the Gilded Age, each a square block and once the private homes of the robber barons of the Nineteenth century, now mostly all museums.
    At Seventieth Street he came upon the Frick Museum, built in 1914 as a private mansion by Henry Clay Frick, the chairman of the Carnegie Steel Company, during a time when such outrageous opulence by the elite was the order of the day. High wrought-iron fences protecting its glorious gardens complete with marble benches scattered along a winding path that invoked a fading memory of a smaller, gentler New York City. Now it stood as a stark reminder of those heady days, and evidence of a way of life long past, yet still somehow relevant as an aide-memoir in the Twenty-first century. After all, how different are they from the grand estates built by the robber barons of the Internet Age? Perhaps in time they will all be museums, too.
    He crossed the avenue and meandered along the stone wall bordering Central Park. At its southern end at Fifty-ninth Street he turned east and headed over to Lexington where he continued downtown. He enjoyed walking through midtown before it awakened for the day, and before the summer sun got too hot. The building supers were out hosing the sidewalks down, and the cold water on the warm cement created welcome pockets of cool air.
    He passed Grand Central Station, a massive endeavor when built, now dwarfed by the ever-growing city, ghostly in its silence, soon to be inundated with harried commuters. Its ceiling, painted by artists Paul Helleu and Charles Basing, included a complete display of the zodiac that always made Lowell chuckle when he walked through its giant corridor. The sky is painted backwards. Nobody seems to know if it was a mistake or if reversing the heavens had some hidden meaning for the artists.
    He ambled through Murray Hill in the east Thirties and into Little India, passing dozens of restaurants already preparing for the day’s business, the pungent smell of curry seeping out of windows and vents.
    When Lowell reached Twenty-fourth Street he turned east for two blocks, went into Starbucks on the corner and picked up his second coffee of the day. Retracing his steps for a quarter of a block, he entered a nondescript brown building, and took the elevator to the sixth floor, opened the office door, and entered the suite of the Starlight Detective