Vermilion Read Free Page B

corpse’s staring clouded eye.
    Lawrence let go of the branches, sifting snow over the bruised head, and stood erect. The boy wore a too-large nylon football jacket, dark blue with yellow piping; the insignia was of a high school in Pennsylvania. A thin green sweatshirt was still tucked carefully into thin faded denim jeans. The corpse’s feet, in dirty white athletic socks and worn black sneakers, pushed against the black trunk of one of the hemlocks.
    Lawrence pushed aside some of the higher branches, and looked across the expanse of inclined whited lawn, thick with bare lindens and blue spruce, up to the Scarpetti’s house. The structure was a solid three stories, squarish, covered with cream stucco. An ornate parapet running about the edge of the roof was the only decoration on the otherwise severe 1920s design. Nothing stirred behind the windows on the near side of the house.
    The snow on the lawn was unmarred. Lawrence turned to look briefly up and down the road, which ended in a cul-de-sac two houses beyond. There were no footprints near the boy’s body, but a faint set of tire tracks came up from the highway to the spot, and was repeated going down again. The boy had evidently been dumped shortly after the snow began to stick.
    Professor Philip Lawrence smiled with pleasure as he contemplated informing Representative Mario Scarpetti that the body of a young man had been deposited beneath his hemlocks. He glanced once more at the corpse, and then stepped through the screen of evergreens, heading toward the house.

Chapter Three

    D ANIEL VALENTINE punched a key on the cash register. The bell pinged sharply as the “$1.00” tab popped up into the tiny glass window and the drawer slid open. He smoothed the bill out and pushed it into the proper compartment. Before closing it, Valentine reached into the back of the drawer and extracted matches and a fresh pack of Lucky’s.
    Valentine opened the cigarettes and took one out. He leaned his elbows lazily on the highly polished bar and smoked sedately, consciously enjoying this slow part of the evening. In less than an hour, Bonaparte’s regular crowd would begin its erratic but inevitable buildup. He sighed and dragged deep on the Lucky; he was weary and the 2:00 A.M. closing seemed about four days away. For the fifth time in ten minutes, he swept his eyes across the room for a head count.
    A little down from the register two men in business suits talked quietly and laughed softly as they sipped at a third round of rye. In a shadowed corner stood three other men, who were regulars at Bonaparte’s.
    In rattan chairs set among the jungle of palms in the room behind the mirrored bar two more men pursued a low-voiced serious argument, the same discussion that had occupied them in an identical manner—in the same chairs, across the same table—over the past couple of months. The walls of this back room were a dark rich green. Six more rattan chairs were grouped around three more glass-topped wicker tables. In the corner was a lacquered baby grand.
    Valentine checked his watch. Trudy, scheduled to play at the piano from ten to two, was late, but not much later than usual. Trudy maintained that she couldn’t tell the time on a digital clock.
    Valentine looked across the room, through the opened white louvered doors. The foyer was empty but for Irene at her station in the coat checkroom. Irene was a plump woman in her sixties, who wore her white hair pulled severely back into a bun at the nape of her neck. Large round rhinestone-studded bifocal glasses perched at the bridge of her thin red nose. Alert but motionless, hands resting on the lower half of the Dutch door, Irene stared ahead as if she were momentarily expecting to witness a bloody murder on the staircase that led to the dance floor above. She did not notice Valentine’s wink.
    Valentine mixed himself a tonic water and lime.
    Bonaparte’s had changed little since it was