Claire and Present Danger Read Online Free PDF

Pepper’s Personal Sense of What Is Right off the list of licensing prerequisites. A P.I. license was a business license, not a higher degree in philosophy.
    I’m familiar with all of this because more than once we’d discussed my likely need to dismount my high horse. But it had been theoretical then, and mostly a joke.
    “You have time for it?” Mackenzie asked with an edge of impatience. “Sorry to be rushed, but my class—”
    Of course I agreed, and I scribbled down the woman’s name and address.
    After I hung up, I was still thinking about pros and cons and ethics and investigating your son’s beloved, and my expression must have shown my disdain.
    “Everything’s all right, isn’t it?” Sunshine asked. This time, her smile was small, filled with hope, but not quite ready to commit.
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    CLAIRE AND PRESENT DANGER
    I hated frightening her, casting a shadow on her golden world. I envisioned the landscape of her mind with Disney-style supernatural sunbeams crisscrossing one another and, on each, a blue-bird, warbling.
    “Everything’s perfect,” I said. “In fact, I just got some good news.”
    The good news was: This mother-in-law from hell wasn’t mine.
    25
    Three
    I’Dpassed this solid old building countless times, and many of those times, I’d stopped to admire its concrete ornamentation—
    cornucopias and wreaths, stone grape clusters, bouquets of roses—an unabashed stony hosanna to abundance and pleasure.
    This afternoon, I didn’t pause for a long examination. It was still too hot to willingly dawdle outside. The air trembled and lay low, vibrating with hidden electrical charges in the dark clouds.
    But even if I hadn’t been hoping there’d be air-conditioned relief inside, I was eager to see Mrs. Fairchild’s home, having long speculated what the pre–WW II apartments looked like.
    For starters, how lush to have the elevator stop at one’s front 26
    CLAIRE AND PRESENT DANGER
    door instead of open onto a long corridor. This was Claire Fairchild’s floor, every parqueted inch of it, including the blue and ruby Oriental rug outside a door that looked newly lacquered with layers of a shimmering cream. The brass NO SMOKING plaque next to the buzzer seemed anachronistic in these lush, prewar surrounds.
    When the cream door was opened, Mrs. Fairchild’s condo proved one of the few things that turned out to be exactly as I’d fantasized it. High ceilings, carved crown moldings, mellow wood paneling, herringboned inlay floors with more jewel-toned Persian rugs. And that was only the foyer.
    “Lovely,” I couldn’t help but say to the housekeeper, even though I wasn’t sure whether my private eyes were supposed to notice architectural niceties.
    The housekeeper was the roundest woman I’d ever seen. She was tiny and apparently pregnant with someone huge, and her unborn child occupied all the space available from her chin to her thighs. “Mrs. Fairchild, she waits for you in living room,” she said.
    “You see no smoke sign, yes? You wear perfume?”
    It took a while to sort out her unmatched facts and questions. “I don’t smoke, no,” I said. “I do wear perfume, but I’m not wearing it now.”
    “Perfume make Mrs. Fairchild sick.” She turned away from me.
    I followed her, amazed she could walk this briskly, or, in fact, move at all. It looked as if it would be easier for her to roll.
    I wondered if Claire Fairchild had environmental allergies, although this carpeted and draped home was anything but the stark-surfaced clean room I thought such sufferers required.
    The living room’s street-side wall was almost entirely tall French windows that, on a nicer day, would probably have been open onto a balcony edged with a filigreed, art deco railing. Despite the gunmetal light this afternoon, the room sparked and glowed with carved and polished surfaces.
    And it was air-conditioned. I took a deep breath and relaxed into it.
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    GILLIAN ROBERTS
    A sandy-haired man in his forties