Fiddle Game Read Online Free PDF

yet?”
    “We talked to a James Cox, recently released on a bond provided by you.”
    “And?”
    “He says he doesn’t have a sister.”
    “What?” Now it was my turn to say “bullshit,” but I didn’t want to sound just as lame as Detective Stroud. “Did you make him go look at the body anyway?”
    “You’re not too bright, are you, Jackson?” Stroud was shifting away from the window, towards me. I think he was trying to be menacing, but he didn’t have the stature or the presence for it. “If he doesn’t have a sister, he can’t exactly tell us if that’s her, can he?”
    “We made him look,” said Evans, ignoring his partner.
    “And?”
    “Says he never saw her before.”
    “Then why would she hock her heirloom violin to bail him out?”
    “Well, we don’t really know that she did, do we?”
    “No,” said Stroud, now moving around so he and his partner flanked me at the table. “Alls we know is what Jackson here told the officer at the scene.”
    “Officer Krupke?” I said. That wasn’t the officer’s name, of course, but it seemed like a clever thing to say.
    “Yeah, Krupke,” said Stroud. “Good cop, but he don’t always know to ask the right questions.”
    Oops. If that didn’t clinch it for me, it should have.
    “So we’re thinking,” said Evans, “that you maybe ought to just show us the contract you had the woman sign.”
    “And maybe the violin you say she gave you for security, too,” said Stroud.
    “And maybe you’d like to show me a warrant,” I said.
    “Maybe we could get one.”
    “Maybe you couldn’t, too. What do you think you have probable cause to suspect, anyway, issuing a bond to the wrong client?” I bent back down and took the shot on the ten ball, missing it badly. Wait for the Zen moment, Jackson? But the new lie of the balls gave me an excuse to move out from between my new friends and take a stance by the opposite rail. As I moved around the table, I looked over at the ongoing nine ball game. Wide Track Wilkie was nowhere to be seen. I began to get a very bad feeling in my gut that had nothing to do with Lefty’s onions.
    “Murder,” said Evans.
    “We agree about that,” I said, bending down to sight the new shot, again measuring the geometry of space and bodies. “So why aren’t you guys out checking body shops and outstanding traffic warrants?”
    “Because the car didn’t kill her,” said Stroud.
    “Excuse me all to hell,” I said, mentally adding you dumb shits . “I was there, remember? I saw them put her in a body bag.”
    “Oh, she was dead, all right. Wasn’t she, Detective Stroud?”
    “Dead, Detective Evans. Broken neck. But it wasn’t broken by any car. According to the M.E., somebody did it to her with his hands, real up-close and personal, like.”
    “We think maybe it was you,” said Evans. “So, like we were saying, we think maybe you better show us that contract.”
    “And that violin,” said Stroud.
    The room was starting to feel very small. “I think you’re both so full of shit your eyeballs are brown,” I said. “I don’t believe the M.E. has even looked at her yet. I want to see the medical report.”
    “Oh, we’ll do better than that,” said Evans. “We’ll take you down to the Morgue, and you can see for yourself. We’ll go there on our way to the precinct, to talk it all out.”
    “After he gives…” began Stroud.
    “Shows,” corrected Evans.
    “…yeah, shows us the violin.”
    They were single-minded goons, I had to give them that. “Am I under arrest?” I said.
    “You want to be?”
    I thought about it for a minute. Forcing them into one more formality might slow them down a bit, but I didn’t need the extra handicap of wearing cuffs. And I now had no doubt that I was going to have to go with them, whether I insisted on formalities or not. “No,” I said, “but I want to call my lawyer.”
    “Be our guest.”
    They would say that, wouldn’t they? Especially since we all knew we