False Negative (Hard Case Crime) Read Online Free PDF Page B

down. He tried the Post and the News , and stayed in the city to hear Miles Davis at a joint off Sheridan Square. His mailbox was stuffed when he came home. A letter from Turner Men’s Group stood out from the bills and the junk.
    The way his luck was running, it had to be a rejection. But the manuscript came back with a rejection, didn’t it? He dropped the envelope twice before he got it open, and a check for two-hundred, eighty-four dollars and sixty cents sailed to the floor.
    Jordan kissed it. He wanted to show it to his friends, to frame it, but most of all to spend it. Until he lived off his earnings he wasn’t ready to call himself a writer.
    He phoned Pelfrey at Real Detective , who said, “Congratulations, welcome to the staff.”
    “When are you going with my story? I’ll need to pick up a dozen copies.”
    “I’ll put you down for two dozen,” Pelfrey said. “It’s how we maintain circulation, selling magazines to new writers. We’ve got you scheduled for March Sensational Detective , one of our best-selling titles.”
    “It’s a long time to wait to see my name in print.”
    “March Sensational goes to the printer at Christmas. It hits the stands in January. When can I expect another piece from you? The body on the beach sounds promising.”
    “The cops are spinning their wheels. It’ll be a while.”
    “You shouldn’t have trouble finding good cases in South Jersey.”
    “I’m not with the Press any longer.”
    “You didn’t quit when the check arrived?” Pelfrey said. “Let me give you some advice: Don’t put money down on a new house just yet. There will be times when you curse the killers for not working hard enough for you.”
    “I’ll go easy on them, I promise.”
    It bothered him that Pelfrey didn’t want to know why he’d left the Press . Was Real Detective so hungry for copy that they accepted stories from anyone, no questions asked?
    “Read all the papers in your neck of the woods, and clip the promising murders,” Pelfrey said. “The Palmer case is one of the best first stories I’ve published. You have a future with us, if you want it.”
    “I’ll start looking.”
    When he was a Press man, he’d barely glanced at the suburban dailies, didn’t think of them as serious competition, if he thought of them at all. Coming back from the corner with a stack of them under his arm, he felt ashamed, the way he would bringing home dirty books.
    They were lousy papers. He hated to consider that he might end up working on one. The coverage was terrible. Reporters stinted on the news in favor of garden parties, and bridge club meetings, and the churches. The only mention of murder was a squib in the Margate Light , a couple of graphs from the United Press on the investigation in Little Egg Harbor that was going nowhere.
    It wasn’t just killers that he faulted for not doing their job.Potential victims were not making themselves easy prey. The cops had been struck blind. Poisonings were misdiagnosed as tummy aches, cases going begging because corpses remained undiscovered under freshly poured patios. Bumblers were preventing him from making a living.
    He filled a thermos and drove south, stopping for the papers in every town. At Cape May he turned back along Delaware Bay. He steered clear of the police stations and newsrooms where he had no contacts. His interest in bloody murder would mark him as a suspicious character to the cops. Enterprising reporters would hear him out, then pitch Pelfrey themselves. If he learned of a good story, he’d introduce himself. In the meantime it was enough to find out what was going on.
    At Dennisville he went into Cumberland County. The isolated farm country was an unlikely setting for skillful homicide. In the sticks husbands bludgeoned cheating wives and were stabbed in their sleep by them. Jealous boyfriends gunned down love rivals on the high school playing field. Straight razors mediated craps games in the migrant camps. Killers lacked