Crazybone Read Online Free PDF

far, even with me. Simple fact was, the flat was no longer home to me and the condo was.
    I straightened as the cat continued to wind himself around my legs, making his fluttery little motorboat noise. “Talk about what?”
    “Cybil. I spoke to her a little while ago.”
    “She all right?”
    “She says she is. I don’t think so.”
    “Not some kind of health problem?”
    “No, thank God.”
    “Trouble with her new novel?”
    “Not that, either. Something’s going on over there.”
    Cybil was Kerry’s eighty-year-old mother. “Over there” was Redwood Village, a seniors’ complex in Marin County where Cybil had lived the past two years. In the forties and fifties she’d been a successful writer for the pulp magazines, mainly of stories about a hard-boiled detective named Samuel Leatherman. She had abandoned fiction writing when the pulps folded, and taken it up again after a forty-year hiatus when she moved to Redwood Village. You’d think she might have lost some of her skills after such a long layoff, but not if you knew Cybil. She had not only written her first novel and sold it to one of the smaller New York publishers, she’d been given a contract for a sequel.
    I said, “What do you mean, going on?”
    “At Redwood Village.”
    “You mean with the staff? One of her neighbors?”
    “I’m not sure. But it might be serious.”
    “What makes you say that?”
    “I think she wants to hire you to investigate whatever it is.”
    “What? Oh, come on—”
    “I’m not kidding. She didn’t come right out and say so, but she hinted around about it.”
    “Didn’t she give you any idea of what it is?”
    “Just that it has something to do with Archie Todd. You remember him, the retired ferryboat captain who lived across from her.”
    We were in the kitchen now, procuring a beer for me and a glass of wine for Kerry. I took a long swig of Bud Light before I said, “What about Captain Archie?”
    “He died suddenly last week. I got the impression Cybil believes it may not have been of natural causes.”
    “Suicide?”
    “Or homicide.”
    I had another long pull. “In a place like Redwood Village? Who would want to kill a nice old bird like Captain Archie?”
    “Don’t ask me.”
    “How did he die?”
    “She didn’t say. She wants us to come to lunch on Saturday and she’ll talk to us about it then.”
    “What did you tell her?”
    “I said we’d come. I thought you’d be as curious as I am.”
    “Sure, curious. But if she actually does want to hire me... My God, she’s got me confused with Samuel Leatherman.”
    “You can listen to what she has to say, can’t you? It’s not like you’re under any obligation to her.”
    “I didn’t mean I wouldn’t listen. I only meant—”
    “Keep an open mind and then do what you think best,” Kerry said. “She really is upset about whatever happened to Captain Archie. I could hear it in her voice. And Cybil is more level-headed than either of us, you know that. If she thinks something funny’s going on, then something probably is.”
    “Okay, okay. If there’s anything I can do for her, you know I will.”
    We took our drinks into the living room and settled into our Mom and Pop chairs. But I didn’t get to enjoy the rest of my beer. Kerry saw to that.
    “There’s something else we have to discuss,” she said.
    “Uh, what?”
    “Friday night. The cocktail party at Bates and Carpenter. I told you about it last week, remember?”
    A little worm of premonition began to crawl slimily among the hairs on my neck. “I remember,” I said warily. “What about it?”
    “I know how much you hate large social gatherings, but—”
    “Oh God.”
    “—but I need you to go with me.”
    “No,” I said. “No way.”
    “It’s important. To me, to the agency, and to Anthony DiGrazia. I wouldn’t ask you if it wasn’t.”
    “DiGrazia?”
    “Don’t play dumb. I told you about him, too. My new account — DiGrazia’s Old-Fashioned Italian