Rainy City Read Free Page A

the somber mood by switching on the Bible thumpers. Though she had been raised in a strict religious atmosphere, Kathy had forsaken all organized worship and loved to mock her past. The radio dial was loaded with proselytizing preachers on this cloudy, windswept Sunday.
    “What if Burton’s not home?” Kathy asked suddenly.
    “Sunday morning?” I looked at my watch. “Not yet nine-thirty? Are you kidding me? And miss Brother Andy Bob? Even the mayor is home in front of the tube. Hallelujah, Brother! Amen, Sister! Praise de Lord Jesus!”
    I rolled the dial and tuned in several evangelical speakers. Each seemed more vociferous and impassioned than the last. Everyone had Sunday fever. After a block, Kathy caught the infection and we were swamping the cab with amens! and hallelujahs! Kathy giggled like a child concealing a pocketful of snitched cookies. It’s contagious when someone you know and are fond of laughs with you. Anyone hearing us would have thought we had both gone over the wall at Western State, one of the local loony bins. Kathy sang out, “Praise the Lord, kiss the devil, and shine my boots!”
    The mirth stopped when we got to the street the Nadiskys lived on.
    I swerved in the nick of time. It was one of the new, smaller Cadillacs swooshing up the street toward us. The other driver was determined not to give an inch.
    Hunched over the steering wheel of the oncoming vehicle was a large, angry man. He had grizzled hair and bushy caterpillar eyebrows. The speeding Cadillac was crowded with faces, among them a middle-aged woman, a small towheaded girl in her lap.
    When a car comes at you fast enough to kill everyone involved, you don’t have much of a chance to reconnoiter. All I saw clearly was a strobe-light glimpse of the infant blonde. She looked as if she were in a state of shock, as if Santa had just puked on her. She sucked her thumb madly, a tattered blanket pressed up against the opposite side of her face creating a giant, formless ear muff.
    Kathy pulled her hands off the dashboard where she had impulsively reached to brace for an accident. “That was Angel.”
    “Melissa’s kid?”
    She nodded. “I think that was her grandfather at the wheel.”
    “If he eats like he drives he’ll choke to death.”
    The Nadisky homestead was around the corner a block away. The houses were all tiny, cramped, squarish, but it was easy to single out the Nadisky place. It was the only yard where the grass grew past your knees. The only place that had an overturned, rusted wheelbarrow canted against the front porch. The only bungalow with water-spotted sheets tacked in the windows where drapes should have been. The only house on the block where the front door stood wide open.
    A late-model, tan sedan was parked at the curb, the motor chugging, puffballs of exhaust meandering up the sidewalk. More out of habit than reflex, I stopped behind the sedan and scrawled the license number down on the tablet I kept in the glove box.
    “Is that their car?” I asked, realizing even as I spoke that the spanking-new undented sedan did not match the condition of the house, or the rest of what I’d gleaned about Burton and Melissa.
    Kathy was already on her way up the stairs toward the front stoop, a clown on the run. “They don’t own a car,” she said over her shoulder. “Burton doesn’t drive.”
    I scooted across the truck seat but didn’t catch Kathy until she had already plumbed deep into the residence. It was cold inside, as if the door had been open for a spell. The living room was a shambles, not dirty so much as messy, littered with children’s toys, clothes and sections of the Sunday newspaper. I caught up with Kathy at the entrance to the bedroom—just in time to keep her from taking a blow to the mouth. It was quite a little scene.
    Holder was there. So was Burton. Holder wore a nattily tailored sportscoat, slacks and handmade Italian shoes. He stood facing three-quarters away from the doorway, backhanding