Cold Morning Read Online Free PDF Page B

in the morning?”
    â€œWell,” he grinned, “I am talking to Edna Ferber, author of…”
    â€œ Show Boat .”
    Again the foolish grin. “Sooner or later you might have a story to tell me.”
    â€œI get paid for my stories.”
    â€œNot the ones you want to keep secret.”
    â€œAnd I have secrets you want me to share?”
    A long deliberate pause. “You will.”
    This Joshua Flagg bothered me. At first glance he struck me as a young man, perhaps just in his twenties, with his gangly, slender teenage boy’s body, a long drawn face pocked with acne, a red blister on his forehead. A rumpled, out-of-fashion sports jacket, checkered and frayed at the cuffs. The high-school newspaper editor craving the Fourth Estate’s wonderful and revolutionary scoop. A simple man, harmless. But as I looked at him, I realized something that jarred me. He was not an eager, albeit nosy, boy—rather, he was much older, maybe even in his thirties. His was a good-looking face, but one that spent too many hours in closed rooms, a worm-whiteness to his cheeks. The deep lines around his weary eyes, the sagging lips, the hard-bitten cynicism in those blue-gray eyes. Suddenly I didn’t trust him. My trained nose for news, hammered into me from my days as a nineteen-year-old reporter back in Appleton, Wisconsin, told me something was wrong here. This ferret-like man was up to no good.
    â€œAnd how do you get on with the other fifty Hearst reporters?” I asked him.
    â€œI don’t,” he shot back. “I’m not supposed to.”
    â€œPerhaps they don’t believe you’re working for the chief himself.”
    â€œThey don’t.” He slapped a grin onto his face.
    â€œNeither do I.”
    I walked away.
    ***
    Outside a blast of cold wind slapped me in the face, and I shuddered. I persisted up Main Street, crossed toward the courthouse and the House of Records, maneuvered my way past Meyer’s General Store—with its life-sized cigar-store Indian outside, a carved wooden brave painted a stolid red and black, totally unthreatening—then past Lyman’s Barber Shop, Sussel’s Haberdashery, then past the quaint post office that also contained the small headquarters for the different livery services that sprang up for the trial. I noticed the long black Buick town car sitting in the parking lot, its windshield covered with an opaque layer of frozen ice slick. Inside the passenger side window, a placard, discreet and with familiar gothic lettering: New York Times . Doubtless the feckless driver Willie was in some boardinghouse nearby, most likely talking loudly in his sleep, annoying the other boarders. I assumed someone would eventually and justly smother him with a pillow, maybe the other driver—Marcus Wood, that fashion plate from Vanity Fair , who probably spent his nights in local taverns, his fingers running through his Bryl-creemed hair, as he dreamed of becoming the next Valentino.
    Quiet, quiet, the morning streets said nothing at all.
    Invigorated, feeling better now, my lungs swollen with chilled air, I turned back. It was just a little too cold to be sauntering along. I hurried down a side street, wended my way back, circling behind the county jail, walking alongside the imposing tombstone factory—how ghoulish!—and reached the rear of the Union Hotel. Finally, tired now and ready for a cup of blisteringly hot coffee in the café, I strolled past some untrimmed pale-green juniper hedges and entered the parking lot.
    Loud voices assailed me, amplified by the still morning air. I stopped, but saw no one.
    A woman’s voice blared from the side of a nearby storage shed. Immediately I knew it was Annabel Biggs, that feisty and curious waitress from the café. Her raised voice, thick now with venom, echoed off the metal sides of the shed. “Damn you, Cody Lee.”
    A man grunted. The sound of spitting. He stepped