The Poisoned Rose Read Free

had to say. I just couldn’t. I was too broke, in every way possible, for any more charity. There was nothing she could say to change that.
    So I waited for a few minutes, smelling the damp must of the old interior, watching her. Finally she leaned back and wiped her eyes with the back of her hands. I looked away. Eventually I heard the engine of her Saab start. I looked up as headlights came on. Then the Saab quickly steered away from the curb.
    I ducked down as her car went past. I was confident that she hadn’t seen me. I sat up again and looked in the rear view mirror and watched as she turned left and rode past the train station, toward North Main Street. Then she disappeared from my sight.
    Still, I waited a bit longer before starting my engine and driving away.
    It was just four in the afternoon but looked like dusk. I had thought only minutes ago that it was dawn. I was close to an hour late for my meeting with Frank Gannon, but there was nothing I could do about that now. If it hadn’t been for George pounding on my door, I would have missed it altogether. As I drove I thought of all the ways that my going there was a mistake.
    I rode over flooded streets into Southampton Village. It was just a little over a mile. I parked at the corner of Main Street and Job’s Lane, then ran through the rain to the entrance to Frank’s building. I was soaked through by the time I reached it. His office was the only door at the top of thirteen steep steps. Each plank of creaking wood announced my presence as I climbed up.
    The office was dimly lit; the only windows were at the front and the rear of the long room, but even when it was a sunny day outside they didn’t catch all that much light. Before it was an office this space had been an attic storage area above a women’s clothing store. It still had that feel. The corners were dark, the ceiling slanted, particularly toward the back. The furnishings were simple: a desk and chair positioned midway down, two chairs facing it, and a long couch behind those, its back against the opposing brick wall. The rest of the room was just filing cabinets and unusable space.
    Frank was behind the desk when I entered, seated with his back straight in his big leather chair. He was on the phone, a stack of files at one elbow and a lit reading lamp at the other. Between his elbows was an ink blotter, heavily stained.
    His skin was clean-shaven and taut, and he looked like a man who took care of himself, did so to the point of pampering. No one really knew exactly how well-off Frank was. He had his home on Hill Street, his pretty wife, his two daughters, both in nice Ivy league colleges, and his two Cadillacs. He never seemed to want for anything. His exterior appearance was polished, and yet it did little to hide the real man inside from anyone who did business with him, the rough and violent ex-cop who had found a much better life as a private detective maneuvering in and out of the countless cracks that existed between laws.
    I closed the door behind me and leaned my back against it. I didn’t want to step any farther into that tight room. I looked at Frank for a while, then realized there was someone else here, standing in the back, by the rear window, in the shadows.
    I looked toward the figure and saw that whoever it was, he had his back to me and was glancing at me over his shoulder. He was holding a folded newspaper under his left arm. He waited for a moment, staring at me, before turning away and looking out the rear window at the cop parking lot below. This was obviously what he had been doing before my arrival.
    There was no getting around the fact that whoever this man was, he was a big guy, with a neck like a hydrant. He wore a gray sweatshirt and jeans, and something about his build reminded me of one of those performers in the circus who bend metal bars around their necks as a show of their strength. He wasn’t muscular like a weight-lifter or a professional athlete, just