Bitter Truth Read Online Free PDF

wrapper and then at Caroline and then back at the wrapper. Maybe I had underestimated the viciousness of Jimmy Vigs Dubinsky, and maybe one of my clients, in collecting for my other client, had left this little calling card from Tosca’s at the murder scene.
    “And if I find out who did it,” I said, “then what?”
    “I just want them to leave me alone. If you find out who did it, could you get them to leave me alone?”
    “Maybe,” I said. “What about the cops?”
    “That will be up to you,” she said.
    I didn’t like the idea of this waif rummaging through Tosca’s looking for trouble and I figured Enrico Raffaello wouldn’t like it much either. If I took the retainer and proved to her, somehow, that her sister actually killed herself, I could save everyone, especially Caroline, a lot of trouble. I took another look at the wrapper in that plastic bag, wondered whose fingerprints might still be found there, and then stuffed it into my jacket pocket where it could do no harm.
    “I’ll need a retainer of ten thousand dollars,” I said.
    She smiled, not with gratitude but with victory, as if she knew all along I’d take the case. “I thought it was five thousand.”
    “I charge one eighty-five an hour plus expenses.”
    “That seems very high.”
    “That’s my price. And you have to promise to throw that gun away.”
    She pressed her lips together and thought about it for a moment. “But I want to keep the gun,” she said, with a slight pout in her voice. “It keeps me warm.”
    “Buy a dog.”
    She thought some more and then reached into her handbag once again and this time what she pulled out was a checkbook, opening it with the practiced air you see in well-dressed women at grocery stores. “Who should I make it out to?”
    “Derringer and Carl,” I said. “Ten thousand dollars.”
    “I remember the amount,” she said with a laugh as she wrote.
    “Is this going to clear?”
    She ripped the check from her book and handed it to me. “I hope so.”
    “Hopes have never paid my rent. When it clears I’ll start to work.” I looked the check over. It was drawn on the First Mercantile Bank of the Main Line. “Nice bank,” I said.
    “They gave me a toaster.”
    “And you’ll get rid of the gun?”
    “I’ll get rid of the gun.”
    So that was that. I took her number and stuffed the check into my pocket and left her there with a cigarette smoldering between her fingers. I had been retained, sort of, assuming the check cleared, to investigate the mysterious death of Jacqueline Shaw. I had expected it would be a simple case of checking the files and finding a suicide. I didn’t know then, couldn’t possibly have known, all the crimes and all the hells through which that investigation would lead. But just then, with that check in my hand, I wasn’t thinking so much about poor Jacqueline Shaw hanging by her neck from a rope, but instead about Caroline, her sister, and the slyness of her smile.
    I took the subway back to Sixteenth Street and walked the rest of the way to my office on Twenty-first. Up the stairs, past the lists of names, through the hallway with all the other offices with which we shared our space, to the three doorways in the rear.
    “Any messages, Ellie?” I asked my secretary. She was a young blonde woman with freckles, our most loyal employee as she was our only employee.
    She handed me a pile of slips. “Nothing exciting.”
    “Is there ever?” I said as I nodded sadly and went into my scuff of an office. Marked white walls, files piled in lilting towers, dead flowers drooping like desiccated corpses from a glass vase atop my big brown filing cabinet. Through the single window was a sad view of the decrepit alleyway below. I unlocked the file cabinet and dropped the plastic bag with the Tosca’s candy wrapper inside into a file marked “Recent Court Decisions.” I closed the drawer and pushed in the cabinet lock and sat at my desk, staring at all the work I needed