King Maybe (A Junior Bender Mystery) by Timothy Hallinan

Author:Timothy Hallinan [Hallinan, Timothy]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Crime Fiction
Publisher: Soho Press
Published: 2016-04-12T00:00:00+00:00

PART THREE

KING MAYBE

Don’t say yes until I’m finished talking.

—Producer Darryl F. Zanuck

15

One Thousand, Eight Hundred, and Seventy-Four Twenties and Two Tens

Because I had followed orders and gone over to the phone, when the office door was pushed open, the cop’s gun was pointed directly at my heart.

“Stay right there,” the cop said. “Both hands in plain sight.”

Seemed like excellent advice. “You got it.”

The cop took a step in and stopped as though he’d walked into a force field, his eyes going to the open door on his left. He was in his mid-forties, plump and round-faced, with a short pug nose, a long upper lip, and a shaggy fringe of hair protruding beneath his cap, and there was something familiar about him, which unnerved me even further than I was already unnerved. I’ve done my best for years not to get to a point where I recognize more than a very few cops on sight. If you know them, they know you. And yet I seemed to know him.

He wiggled the gun back and forth about a quarter of an inch, just a way to put his next sentence in bold type, and said, “Anyone behind the door?”

“No. No one in the elevator either.”

“Don’t move.” He stepped toward me, fast, and used his left hand to shove the door, hard enough for it to bang on the wall. From behind him someone who wasn’t visible through the door said in a smoky, emotionless voice, “Don’t bruise the leather.”

The cop said, “The . . . the leather?”

“On the walls.”

The cop said, “Leather walls?”

The other man said, “Discuss it with your decorator. Now, trot on in there so I can get through the door.”

The cop gave me a fast, mean look that suggested he hoped I hadn’t heard that, so I said, “Just a few steps forward will do it. He’s not very big.”

The cop tightened his mouth, put both hands on the gun in the approved movie fashion, and sidestepped to clear the door.

Jeremy Granger couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred forty pounds, and even with the three-inch heels on his cowboy boots, which I put at about $60,000, he stood no more than five-five. He wore an off-white silk shirt, a black leather vest, and black jeans that looked like they’d been sewn directly on him, except that they were cut too short, undoubtedly to give everyone a chance to appreciate the boots. Young as he was—mid-forties, from what I knew—he’d had work done to redefine his cheekbones, fill the lines around his eyes and the corners of his mouth, and build up his chin. His light brown hair was cut all different lengths, slicked straight back, and gelled into bristling points that suggested a porcupine’s quills at rest. He put his hands in the pockets of his jeans and rocked back and forth a little, eyeing me as though I were a car he’d just purchased and he was having second thoughts.

“Nice boots,” I said. “Howard Knight?”

He nodded just enough for me to see it, his eyes on mine.

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