Goodey's Last Stand: A Hard Boiled Mystery (Joe Goodey) Read Free

been eaten away. “See that you do.” Once again I turned to leave the office. As I got to the passage and turned sideways, I heard Lum Kee say, “The fat one is up at your place waiting.”
    I kept walking. I knew what he was talking about. But I was thinking of other things as I climbed the three flights of stairs over Lum Kee’s shop to my apartment. In my weakened state, the rich cooking odors from the apartment on the first floor made my legs go momentarily wobbly. But when I reached the top of the stairs I was faced with a familiar sight—a small, plump man sitting on the hall carpet with his back to my door. I reached out a hand and helped him to his feet.
    “I hope you haven’t been waiting too long,” I said, opening the door.
    “Oh, it hasn’t been too bad,” he said. “I while away the hours thinking about how much I’m being paid to haunt you.” He was plump in a pork-sausage way: sleek, tight, seemingly stretched near the bursting point. He wore a smooth sharkskin suit just a fraction too small in every dimension, and his black hair was not so much thin as uniformly and widely spaced. He was panting slightly from the exertion of getting to his feet.
    I pushed past my visitor through the rectangular living room into my long, thin bedroom and began pulling a couple of suitcases from under the bed.
    “Do you want to put some coffee on?” I called. “Make lots of it— and strong.”
    “Okay,” he called. After a short silence, I heard the cupboard door creak open and the coffee jar land on the Formica sink. The cold water tap rattled into action.
    My apartment wasn’t big. It had just one fairly good-sized bedroom and another small room, in theory a bedroom, but actually the graveyard of anything broken or not currently in use. But each of the rooms, even the closet-sized bathroom, offered a mildly spectacular view of San Francisco and the bay, for which a richer person than I would have paid much more rent. That is, if Lum Kee could have gotten me out. I looked down into a half-empty drawer of underwear and socks, wondering which to take. Finally I dumped the whole drawer into my worn canvas suitcase on the bed. Reaching into the big closet I grabbed hangered clothes at random and stuck them into the other case. With a wardrobe like mine, the choice wasn’t difficult.
    “Coffee’s ready.”
    I came out of the bedroom and found my fat friend sitting on the long couch in front of the bay window, pouring coffee. He handed me a big, brown mug.
    “Thanks,” I said, letting myself fall to one end of the couch and leaning back with my feet straight out on a cushion. I closed my eyes and took a drink of the hot, bitter coffee.
    “I understand you’re in a bit of trouble,” he said.
    “How do you understand that?”
    “The late edition of the Chronicle and—”
    “—the Jon Thatcher Show,” I finished for him.
    “—and the Thatcher Show. He’s making you into a regular feature: The Adventures of Goodey Two-Shoes: Crime Buster.”
    “Wonderful,” I said. “I’m deeply flattered. Have you got the Chronicle?”
    “Here.” He offered me a neatly folded copy of the paper.
    “Forget it,” I said, pushing the paper away. “I don’t think I could take it in my condition.”
    “Why don’t you just give her the divorce, Joe?” he asked with a new, apparently sincere warmth in his voice. “With this latest trouble, you don’t need me around your neck. You’ve got enough problems.”
    I couldn’t help agreeing. For the last three months, the little man— a lawyer’s investigator from New York—had been plaguing me to give Pat a divorce. His name was Seymour Kroll, but I had preferred to call him Fatso, Fattie, Lard-ass and finally Chub, as I’d become used to him, and even fond of the little investigator in the way that a hunchback might come to accept the growth between his shoulders. He was better than no company at all.
    I wasn’t sure myself why I wouldn’t give Pat a