Don't Look Now Read Online Free PDF Page B

knew exactly. He was at 81 per cent. He wasn’t sure how to say it out loud without sounding like some pompous asshole who would actually get that specific about it. ‘About 80 per cent, I believe.’
    Diana Bennett walked forward, stopping a few feet from Paris’s chair. ‘That’s a rather remarkable record, Detective Paris.’
    Paris knew it was courtroom histrionics, but he was still flattered. ‘Not for me to say,’ he said, trying to sound humble. Diana Bennett walked over to her table, reached into her briefcase.
    ‘But thank you for saying so,’ Paris added. ‘Counselor.’
    At that moment Paris noticed the slightest smile forming at the corners of Diana’s mouth. She continued. ‘Please tell us what occurred after you arrived at the King-Kennedy Estates on the evening of June eighth of last year.’
    After taking a moment to organize the chronology in his mind, Paris related how, when he arrived at the scene, the body of Dennell ‘Too Bad’ Breland, sixteen, was enmeshed in the jungle gym directly below the fire escapes at number 1728. He told how witnesses said that someone definitely threw Too Bad off the roof, but nobody could say just who it was. The fact that Too Bad was a Crip, Paris was assured at the time, had absolutely nothing to do with the mass amnesia that seemed to have descended over King-Kennedy that night.
    When Paris made it to the top floor of 1728, the door to Marcella Lorca-Vasquez’s stifling apartment was wide open. Lorca-Vasquez was sitting at the table, handkerchief in hand, weeping. Paris knew that she was the mother of eight-year-old Rodolfo Insana, a boy who had been killed in a recent gang related shoot-out, a homicide for which Too Bad Breland had been a person of interest. These circumstances led investigators to suspect that Lorca-Vasquez may have been the one who gave Breland the ride of his life.
    The fact that she stood five nine and weighed in at about two-sixty told Paris that she was, indeed, capable.
    ‘Detective Paris,’ Diana Bennett said from just a few feet away, her perfume taunting him, ‘we thank you for your time.’
    * * *
    The Homicide Unit occupied the sixth floor of the Justice Center on Ontario Street, six floors below the grand jury room. It was well after four o’clock that afternoon before Paris walked through its doors. The pile of pink and yellow while-you-were-out notes nearly obliterated the blotter.
    ‘You ever going to clean this desk, Jack?’ Tommy Raposo asked, setting down one of the two Styrofoam cups of coffee, along with a fat bear claw, wrapped in a single sheet of bakery wax paper from Casa Dolce. ‘I think this might be a little stale, though. I got it, like, this
morning
.’ Tommy knew how to grind it in. ‘You look like shit too.’
    Paris glanced up. ‘Anything else?’
    Tommy lifted his hands in surrender. ‘I’m done.’
    ‘Good, then take it around the corner. No mood.’
    Tommy Raposo was the precinct fashion plate, always dressed to the nines. He had been Paris’s partner for only a few months, having transferred from the Akron PD when Paris’s partner of three years, the legendary Dom Tomei, had taken his twenty and headed to Florida. Tommy’s style, to Paris’s taste, was a little too slick, but he seemed to be a damn good detective.
    This day Tommy wore a navy, double-breasted suit, blinding white shirt and maroon jacquard tie. ‘Let me know when you want to hit the street.’ Tommy knocked twice on the desk, left the office. Paris suddenly felt like an asshole for snapping at him.
    ‘Hey G,’ Paris yelled. They called Tommy Raposo ‘G’ for
GQ
.
    Tommy poked his head around the doorjamb. He hadn’t moved.
    ‘Thanks for the coffee.’
    ‘And?’
    ‘The bear claw you owed me,
paesan
. The first of many. The coffee was, I’m sure, out of the kindness of your heart.’
    ‘Of course.’ Tommy stepped back into Paris’s office and picked at a microscopic piece of lint on his forearm. ‘So how’d it