Death of a Sunday Writer Read Online Free PDF

office.
    Again, Lucy wondered whether a bowl of vegetable soup and the use of her first name added up to a pass in Chinese, and she looked at herself in the huge mirror that stood near the back wall and told herself not to be silly. Just to be thinking in these terms made her feel ridiculous, but she was a long way from Longborough and she didn’t want to make a fool of herself or reveal the various kinds of naiveté that she was feeling.
    She was interrupted in the process of trying to get comfortable in her situation by a knock on the door. Immediately after the knock, the door opened and a middle-aged man in a short-sleeved shirt and khaki pants entered and sat down. Before she could stop him he had taken an envelope out of his shirt pocket and spread three pictures on the desk, moving aside the bric-a-brac to make room.
    â€œThis is the man my wife called about. We want to know where he is, if he’s safe.” He looked hard at her. “My wife made an appointment with Mr. Trimble. Is he in? You know about this?”
    â€œMr. Trimble is no longer in business. He’s dead. I’m his cousin.”
    â€œYou his partner?”
    â€œNo, the business is closed. I’m just clearing out the office.”
    â€œI made an appointment.” He stared at her aggressively. Eventually, he heard what Lucy had said. He gathered up the pictures. “I’ll have to go somewhere else, I guess. Shit.”
    â€œHave you lost someone?”
    â€œYou could call it that. My son. He’s disappeared. Over a week ago. Personally, I’m glad. I’ve been trying to get him out of the house for ten years. He’s thirty-three. But my wife is worried, so I’d like to find him, so I can have some peace.” He considered what he had said. “He’s not
my
son. This is my second wife; he moved in right after we married. He lives in the basement, breeds tropical fish. We came home from a movie last Monday and he was gone. Took his favourite fish with him, thank Christ. I told my wife, if he’s taken the fish then he hasn’t been kidnapped. Nobody’s going to take a tank full of goddamguppies, are they? No kidnapper, I mean. But she wants to know he’s all right.”
    â€œI can’t help you, I’m afraid. If you want a detective agency, try the Yellow Pages. Maybe you said something to offend him.”
    â€œYeah? I wish I knew what. I’d make a sign and hang it out the front window.”

Chapter Six
    Lucy wondered how many more like him might appear. It was a long way from her first fantasy about Trimble’s world. No distraught, beautiful molls, pleading for help. No man with blood trickling from the corner of his mouth, gasping the two words that meant everything before he died in the doorway. No foreigner with the Luger and the thick accent. She knew why, of course, for none of these characters had appeared even in Lucy’s fiction for at least twenty years. As she had known before she had inherited her cousin’s business, real private detectives deal with shop-lifters, not assassins. Searching for a missing tropical-fish fancier was probably typical. And yet.
    She turned to the computer. Peter Tse had said that this was probably where Trimble had stored his recent records, and she set about retrieving them. She had been trained by the library in the elements of WordPerfect and she had no trouble calling up the files. Trimble had not developed many.
    The first was labelled NEWCL, which she guessed correctly meant new clients. Tse was right about theslowness of Trimble’s detective business. In the last six months, there appeared to have been four new clients — and none of their cases looked interesting.
    All except one were what Trimble called “surveillance” — watching homes to see who came out and went in over a given period of time. Each ended with a dull little summary, a report, which Trimble presumably printed to