Tightrope Walker Read Free Page B

murdered, and who was probablydead now, anyway. Where would a person begin if they decided to look?
    I filled my garden sprayer with water and walked around absent-mindedly spraying my plants for the second time that day. After that I placed Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto on the phonograph and lay on the floor and listened to it, and when that ended it was midnight and I fooled around a little with the banjo, plunking out “She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain,” and “Little Maggie.” Attention is a funny thing: when I meditate I can concentrate on an imaginary candle flame and reach a point where I see all kinds of lovely flashing lights on the periphery. That’s what I was doing now, concentrating on the banjo and hoping I’d find something off on the side.
    But already in the pit of my stomach I knew that I was going to do
something.
I had to, don’t ask me why.
    At two o’clock I turned off the light and climbed into bed and lay down, and then I got up and turned on the light again, and looked up two addresses in the phone book, one of them in the yellow pages. Feeling better, I set the alarm clock and returned to bed. I had expected to toss and turn, and frankly I’d expected a nightmare or two—at the very least that hand reaching up to me from the grave—but I slept soundly and serenely until the alarm woke me at seven.

2
    Mr. Georgerakis met me with a scowl at the door of his apartment. He was wearing one of the Indian blanket bathrobes from the shop which he must have bought in volume years ago because there were still a dozen left, and the price changes on their tags were as long as a grocery receipt, moving from $12.99 to $2.00, all with artistic slashes. I can’t say that the garish colors did much for Mr. Georgerakis’ figure, which was shaped like a Chianti bottle, his considerable weight having dropped between his hips like a woman in the last month of pregnancy, leaving him a thin man at the top and a plump one at the bottom: it made for an interesting line.
    He gave me a baleful stare. “I warned you business was slow, you can’t tell me I deceived you.”
    I hurried to explain that I hadn’t come to complain but to ask about the hurdy-gurdy, and by the time I’d finished explaining I realized I’d taken him much too seriously: he was looking amused, a twinkle in his eyes, as if he found me very funny. “Come in and sit,” he said. “Sit and have a cup of coffee. You took the stairs too fast, you’re too young for a fifth floor walkup. Only old men like me can manage such a climb.”
    “How do
you
manage it?” I asked.
    “Slowly, like a climb up the Matterhorn. Sugar? Cream?”
    “Black,” I told him, “and thank you very much, Mr. Georgerakis.”
    He peered at me from under his heavy gray brows. “You’re a very polite young woman, Miss Jones. Loosen up a little, you’ll live longer.”
    “I’m trying,” I told him.
    “Try harder. Now what’s this about the hurdy-gurdy?”
    I’d worked out what I felt was a convincing little story. If politeness was my severest affliction at that time it was also, I’d found, a very good smokescreen for telling a lie. Nobody doubts anyone who’s polite; it implies a tremendous respect for authority. I told him that a customer was very interested in buying the hurdy-gurdy but first wanted to learn its history from the original owner. “I’m hoping you can remember who you bought it from so I can trace it,” I told him.
    “Remember, no,” he said.
    Damn, I thought, and suddenly realized how much this had begun to mean to me.
    “But look it up I can,” he said, blowing into his cup of steaming coffee.
    “Look it up?” I said dazedly. “You mean you have
records
?”
    He gave me a reproachful glance. “These I offered to you at the lawyers’ office. You should yourself keep records, because of the police. Sometimes things that people sell are hot, stolen, illegal.”
    I vaguely remembered his saying something about