Inspector Queen’s Own Case Read Free

nipple gently into the little mouth. The baby stopped in mid-blat. He seized the nipple with his tiny jaws and began to suck vigorously.
    Mrs. Humffrey stared, fascinated.
    Alton K. Humffrey said almost gaily, “Henry, drive us back to the Island.”
    The old man turned over in bed and his naked arms flew up against the light from somewhere. It was the wrong light or the wrong direction. Or wasn’t it morning? Something was wrong.
    Then he heard the surf and knew where he was and squeezed his eyelids as hard as he could to shut out the room. It was a pleasant room of old random furniture and a salt smell, with rusty shrimp dangling from bleached seaweed on the wallpaper. But the pale blue wavery water lines ran around and around like thoughts, getting nowhere, and they bothered him.
    The night air still defended the room coolly, but he could feel the sun ricocheting off the sea and hitting the walls like waves. In two hours it would be a hotbox.
    Richard Queen opened his eyes and for a moment looked his arms over. They’re like an anatomical sketch of a cadaver, he thought, wornout cables of muscle and bone with corrugated covers where skin used to be. But he could feel the life in them, they could still hold their own, they were useful. He brought his hands down into focus, examined the knurls of joints, the rivuleted skin, each pore like a speck of dirt, the wiry debris of gray hairs; but suddenly he closed his eyes again.
    It was early, almost as early as when he used to wake in the old days. The alarm would go off to find him already prone on the braided rug doing his fifty pushups—summer or winter, in green spring light or the gray of the autumn dawn. The hot shave and cold shower, with the bathroom door shut so that his son might sleep on undisturbed. The call-in from the Lieutenant, while breakfast was on the hod, to report any special developments of the night. The Sergeant waiting outside, the drive downtown. Headed for another working day. Listening to the general police calls on the way down, just in case. Maybe a direct word for him on the radiophone from the top floor of the big gold-domed building on Centre Street. His office … “What’s new this morning?” … orders … the important mail … the daily teletype report … the 9 A.M. lineup, the parade of misfits from the Bullpen …
    It was all part of a life. Even the corny kidding, and the headaches and heartaches. Good joes sharing the raps and the kudos while administrations came and went, not touching them. Not really touching them, even in shakeups. Because when the dust settled, the old-timers were still there. Until, that is, they were shoved out to pasture.
    It’s hard to break the habits of a lifetime, he thought. It’s impossible. What do those old horses think about, munching the grass of their retirement? The races they’d won? The races they could still win, given the chance?
    The young ones coming up, always coming up. How many of them could do fifty pushups? At half his age? But there they were, getting set, getting citations and commendations if they were good enough, a Department funeral if they stopped a bullet or a switchblade …
    There they were. And here am I …
    Becky was stirring carefully in the next room. Richard Queen knew it was Becky, not Abe, because Abe was like a Newfoundland dog, incapable of quiet; and the old man had been visiting in the beach house with its papery walls long enough to have learned some intimate details of the Pearls’ lives.
    He lay in the bed idly.
    Yes, that was Becky creeping down the stairs so as not to wake her husband or their guest. Soon the smell of her coffee, brown and brisk, would come seeping up from the kitchen. Beck Pearl was a small friendly woman with a big chest and fine hands and feet that were always on the move when her husband was around.
    On the beach the gulls were squabbling over something.
    Inspector Queen