False Negative (Hard Case Crime) Read Online Free PDF

his own. He was a slave bringing home a decent salary, a night differential, and eight cents for every mile he used his car in pursuit of the news. He lived near the ocean, but didn’t have time for sailing, rarely went to the beach when he wasn’t called there for a look at a corpse. He showed up on the boardwalk to cover fires, and at nightclubs when he was assigned to provide free publicity. Atlantic City was a great place to visit. Unfortunately he was stuck here. It was one cliché he wouldn’t blame van Pelt for using.
    He had all the time in the world now. But the beaches were cold, the ocean made him seasick. He didn’t fish. On his night-stand was a stack of books he’d been meaning to read, but writers who finished what they started gave him a sour feeling. Tuesday nights he liked to sit in a bar watching Milton Berle on the television. But it was too much time to kill by the hour.
    He called the Bulletin . Flynn wasn’t expected till the end of the week. He drove to New York to catch Charles Mingus in the Village, and returned to Atlantic City after dawn. Two nights later he was back for Billie Holiday on Fifty-second Street, and to leave samples of his writing at the Mirror , the Herald Tribune , the Telegram , and the Brooklyn Eagle . Everyone had heard of the Press reporter who wore out a new Chevy in a year getting drunk every night on Third Avenue. Jordan put no faith in those stories. His Hudson—a better car—wasn’t going to last six months.
    His name was mud at the big city newspapers where he wanted to work. He wouldn’t be caught dead in the backwaters that hadn’t been reached by word of his disgrace. He tried the Bulletin again. Flynn picked up, and said, “I was beginning to wonder if you were still alive.”
    “Makes two of us,” Jordan said. “What did you think of my—of the death house piece?”
    “You spoiled my readers,” Flynn said. “They expect everything flying out of my typewriter to be as good.”
    Flynn wasn’t a professional Irishman. Jordan was put off by his easy flattery. “You heard—?”
    “I just got back from three days in Punxsutawney. The whistle-pig died. They enticed a successor from his lair, and I was there for his investiture. In those precincts there’s not much to talk about other than the order of sciuridae. You were the second leading topic of conversation among visiting journalists.”
    “Then you know why I’m calling.”
    “You’re searching for a new place to collect a paycheck,” Flynn said, “and would be happier moving up rather than down.”
    “Put in the word for me with your editors,” Jordan said. “Tell them the kind of reporter they’ll be getting.”
    “They already know. I don’t have enough influence to change their mind.”
    “Everyone who’s ever worked on a paper does what I did.”
    “They don’t all get caught,” Flynn said. “I won’t step out on a limb for someone who’s going to saw it off under my feet.”
    “I remember something different when you were asking me to cover for you in Trenton.”
    “Haven’t you made empty promises to get a reluctant source to give you what you need?”
    How did you answer without admitting the Bulletin wouldbe crazy to want you? “Rita Snyder can snap her fingers, and I’ll have a job just like that.”
    “She isn’t a finger-snapper,” Flynn said.
    “I’ll ask her.”
    “She wants to forget you,” Flynn said. “It won’t do to remind her. Fisher showed up drunk. He stumbled around the stage, and called her a tub when we walked out on him. Rita blamed me. You more than me for getting us a ringside table.”
    Jordan went to the beach, where he froze. He toured the boardwalk till he got blisters. He hung around bars when Milton Berle wasn’t on the TV. He put down his novel, and worked on a short story that he threw away. He wrote two others as bad as the first. He learned that he didn’t have a suicidal bone in his body.
    The New York papers turned him