Betrayers (Nameless Detective Novels) Read Online Free PDF Page A

toasty brown with orange-yellow trim, a combination that made me think of a huge and artfully constructed grilled-cheese sandwich. The garage door was up and a slope-shouldered man wearing a Giants baseball cap was doing something at a workbench inside. Helen Alvarez ushered me in that way.
    The slope-shouldered man was Leonard Crenshaw. A few years older than his sister and on the dour side, he had lived here with her since the death of her husband eight years ago. Leonard had offered to move in, she’d told me, to help out with chores and to keep her from being lonely. If he had a profession or a job, she hadn’t confided what it was.
    “Don’t mind saying,” he said to me, “I think Helen made a mistake shelling out money to hire you.”
    I didn’t tell him that I was working pro bono; neither did she. “Why is that, Mr. Crenshaw?” I asked.
    “Always sticking her nose in other people’s business. Been like that her whole life. Nosy and bossy.”
    “Better than putting my head in the sand like an ostrich,” Mrs. Alvarez said. She didn’t seem upset or annoyed by her brother’s remarks. I had the impression this was an old verbal tug-of-war between siblings, one that went back a lot of years through a lot of different incidents.
    “Can’t just live her life and let others live theirs,” Crenshawsaid. “It’s Charley Doyle should be taking care of his aunt and her problems, spending his money on expensive detectives.”
    Expensive detectives, I thought. Leonard, if you only knew what some of the big agencies charge for their services. And how seldom they work pro bono, or take on cases like this one.
    “Charley Doyle can barely take care of himself,” she said. “He has two brain cells and one of them is usually passed out drunk. All he cares about is gambling and liquor and cheap women.”
    “A heavy gambler, is he?” I asked.
    “Oh, I don’t think so. He’s too lazy and too stupid. Besides, he plays poker with Ev Belasco and Ev is so tight he squeaks.”
    Crenshaw said, “You know what’s going to happen to you, Helen, talking about people behind their backs that way. You’ll spend eternity hanging by your tongue, that’s what.”
    “Better than spending eternity hanging by what you’ve been overusing all your adult life.”
    “Funny. You’re a riot, you are.”
    “Oh, put a sock in it, Leonard.”
    He didn’t put a sock in it. He said grumpily, “Telling tales about people, hiring detectives, sticking your nose in where it doesn’t belong. Next thing you know,
our
phone’ll start ringing in the middle of the night, somebody’ll bust one of
our
windows.”
    “Nonsense.”
    “Is it? Stir things up, you’re bound to make ’em worse. For everybody. You mark my words.”
    Helen Alvarez and I went upstairs, into a cluttered living room, and she provided me with contact addresses for Charley Doyle and the address of the real estate agency owned by the Pattersons.
    “Don’t mind Leonard,” she said then. “He’s not such a curmudgeon as he pretends to be. This crazy business with Margaret has him almost as upset as it has me.”
    “I try not to be judgmental, Mrs. Alvarez.”
    “So do I,” she said. “Now you go give those Pattersons hell, you hear? A taste of their own medicine, the dirty swine.”
     
    I didn’t go give the Pattersons hell or anything else, including the benefit of the doubt. Tomorrow was soon enough for that. It was late afternoon now, the end of my workday, and what I wanted was a hot shower, a cold beer, and a quiet dinner, in that order.
    So I went home.
    And walked straight into a sudden family crisis.

4
JAKE RUNYON
    “Jumpers,” Abe Melikian said sourly. “God, I hate ’em, I hate ’em with a passion. They want to jump, why don’t they go jump off a bridge, jump off a building? No, they got to jump on my poor ass instead.”
    Runyon made a sympathetic noise.
    “As if I don’t have enough troubles,” Melikian said. “I got a bad back, I got