Waltz of Shadows Read Free

through the bullshit and get to it.”
    “It’s not that easy, Uncle Hank. There’s a lot to it… First, look at this. Tell me what you think it is.”
    He went on the other side of the bed and picked a long, narrow, black photo album off the nightstand and tossed it to me.
    I caught it and looked at it. There was no writing on the outside. It had a copper-colored clasp holding it together, and I unsnapped that.
    Inside were cellophane windows and about a third of the book  filled with photographs. Two wide, six deep. At the top of the page was a photograph of a young man smiling, and beside that photograph was another of the same man, only he wasn’t smiling. He had a small hole in the center of his forehead and his right eye bulged out of its socket. His face was as white as bleached rice. His mouth was closed, but one broken top tooth hung over his bottom lip like a stalactite.
    Below those photos, on the left, was one of a middle-aged man, very much alive. On the right was, I presume, the same man, only you couldn’t tell for sure. His face was a hole. A human jelly doughnut. Shotgun blast, I figured.
    Below those, an elderly sour-mouthed woman sitting in a wheel chair, and on the right, the wheel chair overturned, the woman beside it in a pool of blood and scattering of brains.
    Next page, a man’s face on one side, the other a close up rear view of a naked man with his ass facing out, something jammed up it. A poker, or a thin, lead pipe maybe. I couldn’t make it out. The object and the guy’s ass were smeared with blood.
    The rest of the book was the same sort of thing.
    I said, “What in the hell is this?”
    “I don’t know exactly,” Bill said. “It’s how I got it that’s important. I mean, does that look like special effects to you?”
    “No.”
    “Because it isn’t. That woman on the bottom of the first page. Recognize her?”
    “No.”
    “Mrs. Maude Page.”
    “The heiress?”
    “Yeah. Remember, she was murdered? Pushed down a concrete embankment about a mile from her house. The house was burglarized. Happened a year ago.”
    “I remember something about it. But why is her picture in here? Wait a minute! I know. This is a book of shots from the newspaper morgue. Or more likely the police morgue. Somebody is collecting this stuff. A ghoulish personality. Maybe had a contact at the police department. Gets them to steal the stuff for them… Isn’t you, is it?”
    “No. That’s not what it is.”
    “Well, what is it?”
    “First, will you help me, Uncle Hank?”
    “I don’t know. I’m getting a little nervous here. Tell me how you came by the book.”
    “I been taking a few classes over at the college—”
    “I paid for them, didn’t I?”
    “I’m trying to get an education, Uncle Hank. Do something with my life.”
    “Like when I paid for that goddamn trucker school for you.”
    “I thought it was a good idea, but those trucks get boring.”
    “You never made a run, Bill. You didn’t even finish the course. And remember when you were going to raise those Australian birds? What were they?”
    “Emus. There’s a growing market moving into East Texas. Ten years from now everyone will be eating Emu steaks.”
    “Not raised by you.”
    “Want to hear this or not?”
    “Yeah,” I said. “Tell it.”
    “I guess it begins with Sharon.”
    “Figures. A woman.”
    He sat on the edge of the bed, shook slightly, as if chilled, got a cigarette out of his shirt pocket, put it between his lips, produced a folder of matches from his shirt pocket, peeled off one, scratched it to life and lit up.
    “Since when do you smoke?” I said.
    “Since a pretty short time ago.”
    He took another deep drag and held it in for a long time before he let it out. The cigarette was burned half way down.
    He began to talk.
     
     
     

3
     
     
       First of this semester, Uncle Hank, when you loaned me the money to start college, I decided then and there I wasn’t going to disappoint you