"Laird Long - Broken Hearts" - читать интересную книгу автора (Long Laird)

I pushed my hand through my hair and made a half-hearted attempt to cross my legs. The place made me nervous for some reason. "I knew of a young woman who, if she could read at all, must have known that her father was looking for her. She didn't come home, which told me that she didn't want to be found. Not by him. The woman was probably at best unbalanced, at worst insane. Maybe she had recently escaped from a psychiatric facility, been missing for a short time, and then returned. It was a long shot, but I took it. It was that profile and about fifty phone calls that brought me here." I paused to take a breath. Wallace's steely gaze was unnerving me. "The nuts don't fall far from the trees, Doc," I joked.

She didn't like that one. "The information you were phoning for is quite confidential, you know?"

I shrugged. "Not if you're a cop," I said.

"Which you aren't."

I shrugged again. "Not anymore."

A stony silence followed. It was abruptly chiseled away by a loud rap on the door. We both jumped in our chairs.

"What is it!?" Wallace yelled angrily.

An orderly pushed his shaggy head into the office. There was sweat on his beefy red face. "Room 304!" he shouted, gasping for air. "Suicide!"

She had stabbed herself in the heart with a sharpened screwdriver. The orderly with the chuck steak face said she had hidden the heart-puncher under her bedsprings. It sounded like he was already getting his story straight for the review panel.

There was a piece of paper on her bed addressed to me. The Doctor read it and then handed it to me. She was shaking, and there were tears in her eyes. I read:

'Dear Mr. Sidney,

You know what I did. I only want you to know that it had to be done. I could never go back to him. Not after what he did to my mother and me. What he made us do to him. He drove her to suicide. And now I'll join her. You'll find his heart in a metal box under the house. Please take it to the hospital, where they can examine it, and find out what was wrong with it.

Thank you and good-bye,

Alice'

I looked at Wallace. Her face was a thundercloud about to burst open and rain all over me.

I exited by the side entrance.


LAIRD LONG. Weekday number-cruncher, weekend wordsmith. His genres are hardboiled and humor. Big guy. Born in the sixties, attitude from the fifties. Credits include: 'Classic Pulp Fiction', 'Detective Mystery Stories', and 'Blue Murder Magazine'. Hangs a cyber shingle at: [email protected]

Copyright (c) 2001 Laird Long