Choice of Evil Read Online Free PDF

know,” I told him. “Do it.”
    “Give me a call, uh, tomorrow. Before ten.”
    “Done.”
    “Burke. . .?”
    “What?”
    “Anything you want to tell me?”
    “I got nothing to do with this one.
Any
of them.”
    Davidson nodded, not doubting. If I’d killed anyone, I would have told him. He was sure of that—I’d done it before. He was a good lawyer, knew all the tricks. He wanted to get paid, but he did the work. Better than most, that last part.
    “ Y ou can’t stay here,” Lorraine said, the second she crossed the threshold to Crystal Beth’s place.
    “I know,” I replied.
    She didn’t know what to say to that; a look of surprise froze on her face. “I. . . didn’t mean you had to get out this minute,” she said stiffly. “I just meant. . . I mean, you know why we set this place up. You know what we do. Having a man here. . .”
    “I understand. I’ll be out in twenty-four hours. It’s not like I got a lot of stuff to pack.”
    Pansy’s enormous head swiveled back and forth, following the conversation but dismissing the woman as a threat.
    “Burke. . .”
    “What?”
    “I never liked you,” Lorraine said. “But I know what you did for. . . us. Before, I mean. And I know you loved. . . her.”
    “Crystal Beth. You can say her name.”
    “Maybe
you
can. It. . . hurts me just to. . .”
    “All right. Never mind. I told you, I’ll be out in—”
    “Do you think they’ll ever catch him?”
    “The guy who killed her?”
    “No. The guy who’s killing all of. . .
them
.”
    I shrugged.
    “You don’t care?” she asked, an extra-aggressive tone sliding into her already hard voice.
    “What are you asking me, Lorraine?”
    “If he were to. . . kill them all, he’d get the one who killed. . . her, right?”
    “Kill every fucking fag-basher in the city? Right. That’d do it.”
    “I wish he would. I wish
I
could.”
    “So why don’t you give him a hand?”
    “You wouldn’t understand.”
    “Why? Because it’s a gay thing?”
    “It’s a woman thing.”
    “Yeah? Then how come you keep saying the killer’s a man? It’s easy enough to alter a voice on tape.”
    “He
is
a man. Everyone knows that. I meant. . . Crystal Beth. Her. And me. Between us. You could never get that.”
    “And
that’s
what you hate me for?”
    “I didn’t say I hated you. I said I never liked you.”
    “You know what, Lorraine? I never liked you either.”
    “ T hat matter we discussed the other day?” Davidson’s voice, treading carefully over the line at Mama’s.
    “Yeah.”
    “Your. . . surmise was, in fact, reasonably accurate. The individuals to whom you referred have expressed a desire for an interview, but they cannot seem to locate the. . . object of their interest.”
    Meaning: yes, the cops want to talk to you, and no, they don’t know where you are.
    “You think this ‘interview’ should take place?” I asked him.
    “Assuming the factual content of the material you imparted during our prior conversation is unchanged, I do. If only to. . . reorient their interest.”
    Meaning: yes, if I really had nothing to do with the murders, I should go in and talk to the cops, answer their questions, show them they were wasting their time so they’d leave me alone.
    “Set it up,” I told him.
    “ W hat do you need a lawyer for, you coming in here to assist us with our investigation and all?” the sandy-haired plainclothes cop asked me, nodding his head in Davidson’s direction.
    “Oh, I’d be scared to come here by myself,” I told him. “I heard you guys do terrible things to people when nobody’s watching.”
    “A comedian, too?” his partner asked, a short guy with a round face and a boozer’s nose.
    “Me? Nah. I even heard you guys sometimes put a telephone book on top of a guy’s head and whack it with a nightstick. Doesn’t leave marks, but it kind of scrambles your brains.”
    “Where’d you hear that?” the sandy-haired one