Legends Read Free Page B

this for a moment. Then, shaking his head, he was surprised to hear his own voice responding out loud: “I’m not sure I have a need to know in practice, I might be better able to get on with my dull life if I don’t know.”
    Martin would have dragged out the fictitious dialogue with Dr. Treffler, if only to kill time, if he hadn’t heard the door buzzer. He padded in bare feet through the pool parlor, which he’d converted into an office, using one of the two tables as a desk and the other to lay out Lincoln Dittmann’s collection of Civil War firearms. At the top of the dimly lit flight of narrow wooden stairs leading to the street door, he crouched and peered down to see who could be ringing. Through the lettering and Mr. Pinkerton’s private eye logo he could make out a female standing with her back to the door, scrutinizing the traffic on Albany Avenue. Martin waited to see if she would ring again. When she did, he descended to the foyer and opened the two locks and the door.
    The woman wore a long raincoat even though the sun was shining and carried a leather satchel slung over one shoulder. Her dark hair was pulled back and twined into a braid that plunged down her spine to the hollow of her back the spot where Martin had worn his hand gun (he’d recut the holster’s belt slot to raise the pistol into an old shrapnel wound) in the days when he’d been armed with something more lethal than cynicism. The hem of her raincoat flared above her ankles as she spun around to face him.
    “So are you the detective?” she demanded.
    Martin scrutinized her the way he’d been taught to look at people he might one day have to pick out of a counterintelligence scrapbook. She appeared to be in her mid or late thirties guessing the ages of women had never been his strong suit. Spidery wrinkles fanned out from the corners of her eyes, which were fixed in a faint but permanent squint. On her thin lips was what from a distance might have passed for a ghost of a smile; up close it looked like an expression of stifled exasperation. She wore no makeup as far as he could see; there was the faint aroma of a rose-based perfume that seemed to come from under the collar on the back of her neck. She might have been taken for handsome if it hadn’t been for the chipped front tooth.
    “In this incarnation,” he finally said, “I’m supposed to be a detective.”
    “Does that mean you’ve had other incarnations?”
    “In a manner of speaking.”
    She shifted her weight from one foot to the other. “So are you going to invite me in or what?”
    Martin stepped aside and gestured with his chin toward the steps. The woman hesitated as if she were calculating whether someone living over a Chinese restaurant could really be a professional detective. She must have decided she had nothing to lose because she took a deep breath and, turning sideways and sucking in her chest, edged past him and started up the stairs. When she reached the pool parlor she looked back to watch him emerging from the shadows of the staircase. She noticed he favored his left leg as he walked.
    “What happened to your foot?” she asked.
    “Pinched nerve. Numbness.”
    “In your line of work, isn’t a limp a handicap?”
    “The opposite is true. No one in his right mind would suspect someone with a limp of following him. It’s too obvious.”
    “Still, you ought to have it looked at.”
    “I’ve been seeing a Hasidic acupuncturist and a Haitian herbalist, but I don’t tell one about the other.”
    “Have they helped you?”
    “Uh-huh. One of them has there’s less numbness now but I’m not sure which.”
    The ghost of a smile materialized on her lips. “You seem to have a knack for complicating simple things.”
    Martin, with a cold politeness that masked how close he was to losing interest, said, “In my book that beats simplifying complicated things.”
    Depositing her satchel on the floor, the woman slipped out of her raincoat and carefully