"Mitchell Smith - Daydreams" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith Mitchell)

Commissioner's Queens. -Special events, sensitives, errands, and ass
kissing, all orchestrated by Chief of the Department Delgado, himself
beloved of the Commissioner.

Ellie's had been another path. -Public relations. The "Klein" was an
accident of marriage to a tall, thin young attorney with inquiring eyes,
and not an authentic ethnicity.

Ellie was. WASP, maiden name Bowden, and was, if not beautiful, still
quite pretty in a lanky, pale blond, slightly lantern-jawed way. Eyes
equally pale, a puzzled, washed out blue.

An oddity on the Force, these days. And not entirely a successful one.
Good grades at the Academy; thought at first to be a corner. A crisp
pistol shot-none of the wavering overcontrol most ladies indulged in.
Spirited n hand-to-hand, though it was difficult to be certain of a fair
test there, the males taking it easier, the females making it harder for
her as they struggled, sweating on the mats. She had an odd, yelping,
jumping style of combat, intrinsically dissimilar to the grim dark
determination the Italian and black girls showed, the nasty hysterical
violence of the Irish. --Still, perfectly all right there, all right in
hand-to-hand. And absolutely first class in law and regulations-a
winner as well in formation, and the Department's organizational charts.

Something of a failure in the locker room. There, in a sweat-dank ditch
of women, where lovely breasts and buttocks jostled with tough talk,
waste cans loaded with soaked tampons, an occasional towel-snapping
bully-in that damp garden Ellie Klein failed to shine. The women
noticed a certain delicacy of approach, almost reproach, carefully
concealed behind a lattice of macha grunts and curses.

She wasn't comfortable with them. -Not with any excuse of daintier
class. Her father was, or had been, a carpenter out in Far Rockaway,
and the family had never seen better days, except, perhaps, when a
distant ancestor had owned a few hundred acres of Long Island, and that
had been so long ago that the land had been more a malarial health
menace than real estate gold. Nor was she educated beyond them. Two
years at Sarah Lawrence on scholarship--she'd left at the beginning of
her junior year, gone down to the Village to paint, and, a year later,
met Nate Klein at a party-meant not much to hardworking girls who'd
slogged through four years at Brooklyn College, CCNY, or NYU.

Hers was simply a slightly different rhythm. Just different enough to
irritate. The others weren't cruel to her everyone, after all, was
grownup, busy, intent on graduating, getting on the force. Some were
pleasant to her, and one of them liked her very much.

The instructors, always alert for the oddball, if not too much else,
picked up those vibes, on and off the mat, and let the tall blonde
through with all her good grades, but with no corresponding word of