Vermilion Read Free Page A

he ended up.
    â€œI don’t know if I should buy you another drink.”
    Billy looked to his side. His unfocused vision smeared white hair and a round pink-cheeked face across his brain. He turned back to the fight.
    The man signaled the bartender and received another beer. He handed it to Billy.
    â€œDrink up and we’ll go.”
    Billy took the sweating bottle and looked slowly up at the older man. Billy stared at his face and found it more unhandsome than he was accustomed to. The man wore a heavy overcoat over a dark brown double-knit leisure suit. Beneath the off-white dress shirt, a thin gold chain was hung about his wrinkled pink neck.
    â€œThirty-five,” Billy said carefully, trying to sound sure of himself and sober.
    The thin-lipped mouth pursed. The bright eyes dropped down Billy’s body appraisingly. “Twenty,” the man said.
    Billy swiveled the bar stool around, and stared at the clock behind the bar. Nexus would close in twenty-five minutes. He raised the beer and drank it down in several long gulps.
    â€œAll right,” he said. He dropped unsteadily to the floor and the man gripped his arm. Billy pulled away and struggled into his jacket.
    Above the disco version of “Auld Lang Syne” there was a hoarse shriek. The bartender rushed past Billy, leaping into the crowd on the dance floor. The man with the white hair and pink cheeks led Billy up the ramp.
    From the top, Billy turned and stared into the bar. The crowd in the center of the dance floor had pulled back a little. The bartender had been knocked to the floor. The TWA stewardess had ripped off Daisy Mae’s blouse, and tossed it to a girlfriend, who was dressed as a geisha. Daisy Mae shrieked in terrible anger.
    The man touched Billy’s arm and guided him out into the cold New Year’s night.

Tuesday, 2 January

Chapter Two

    P ROFESSOR PHILIP Lawrence stood on his front porch and stared across the snow-covered street at the row of hemlocks that screened the house of his neighbors across the way. His breath crystallized in sharp puffs, and he squinted angrily in the cold glare. A pile of someone’s discarded clothing had been spilled out onto the side of the road. Mercifully, the heap had been dumped not onto his own lawn, but onto the property of Mario Scarpetti, fourth-term representative to the Massachusetts legislature.
    Pulling his wide-brimmed black felt hat down further and wrenching his collar up about his neck, Lawrence moved resolutely down the sidewalk. He was wrapped in a black greatcoat and carried a black leather attaché case in one kid-gloved hand. His full auburn beard was stiffening in the cold air. The marred landscape rankled him and he knew that if he did not retrieve and dispose of the trash it would be there to annoy him when he returned from a full day of classes. The Scarpettis had money and a certain peculiar prestige, but little sense of pride in the appearance of their neighborhood.
    As he crossed the road, powdery snow clouded up about his black boots. From his coat pocket he retrieved a pair of glasses, thin gold-rimmed spectacles with smoked amber lenses. As soon as he had them on, the lenses fogged. With well-practiced but grudging patience, he wiped the glass clear with a white starched kerchief. He stood on the sidewalk a few feet from the row of hemlocks, and looked down through the dense evergreen foliage. His mouth loosened and fell slightly open.
    â€œJesus Christ …!” he exclaimed.
    The head of the corpse, its face turned modestly into the snow, was obscured by the deep-green branches of the hemlocks. Without hesitation Lawrence bent over and pulled back the foliage.
    The man was young, no more than twenty, Lawrence surmised. He was sprawled on his side, arms and legs tangled in the broken lower branches of two of the trees. Above the right temple, the thick blond hair was caked with blood. A thin stream had frozen like a bright red frame around the