How I Spent My Summer Vacation Read Online Free PDF Page A

was simply a much-married orthodontist. What a unique front for his criminous ways. “Good luck to both of you,” I said.
    “Darling,” Lala began. “Don’t run away because you’re so upset that I might not wind up with Grandpop.”
    I went to join Sasha, who was in a clump of casino escapees. A few were on stools—including the gray-haired man Tommy said had three days to pay or die. He didn’t look particularly worried about it, and in fact seemed tilted toward Sasha, a smile on his face. She smiled back. And that’s how it was—a pending date with Mr. Wonderful didn’t mean you couldn’t meanwhile line up his successors.
    I tapped her on the shoulder.
    “Where’ve you been?” she asked. “Frankie,” she said to the bartender, “this is my friend Mandy, the one I was talking about.” Frankie nodded at me without much interest. “You had a call from your detective,” Sasha said.
    “Mackenzie? Why?”
    “He must have detected you.”
    Which didn’t take much skill. My answering machine message said where I was.
    “He’s here in River City, too,” Sasha said. “You can run but you can’t hide.” She handed me a hotel postcard with a phone number scrawled on its back.
    The elusive cop was here. I shook my head in wonderment. “I thought it was only hype, but it’s obviously true. This really must be America’s most popular vacation destination.”

Three
    ANY OBJECTIVE REEVALUATION OF MY relationship with Mackenzie required distance, so I gave up on both objectivity and reevaluation for a while. Mackenzie mysteriously manages to seem writ in capital letters, despite his easy Southern style. He doesn’t strut, he doesn’t shout, he doesn’t push, and I honestly don’t know what it is he does do. It can’t all be his smile and drawl, can it? That’s some of what I’d meant to work out while I was here.
    “I came down because Nicky B. grew up here,” he explained. Nicky B. was the prime suspect in a missing and presumed murdered child case. The police were so positive that Mr. B. had done it that they had turned the press on him, but they could find nothing except an abiding and unwholesome strangeness in the man’s interests, and that was not enough to make a case or an arrest. “Thought maybe there was somethin’ we’d missed, somethin’ relevant. Turns out, the house he grew up in at the Inlet’s gone. Whole street is pretty much gone. In fact, the entire neighborhood looks like Beirut. Nothing but rubble except for a lone, half-boarded-up house here and there an’ people who look like they barely survived the destruction.”
    I knew, so he definitely knew, that he could have found out about Nicky B.’s former neighborhood by telephone and fax and computer data base. Or even through common knowledge. The Inlet, never prime real estate, had been bulldozed a decade and a half ago in anticipation of a casino-supported renaissance that is due to appear along about the same time as Godot.
    When the casino referendum was pending, the promoters’ ads showed $100 bills falling from the sky, and when the referendum passed, people danced in the streets. But money has not yet descended from the stratosphere, certainly not in the direction of the Inlet, and anybody who knew anything about the gilt-edged poverty-stricken city knew about the ruins at the end of the boardwalk. That probably even included Mackenzie’s good old boys back home in the Louisiana bayou.
    “Guess I’m not the best detective in the whole entire universe. Guess I goofed and I’m forced to take an actual day or so off,” he drawled. “Thought maybe we could spend it together.”
    Actual time together, without murderous interruptions. My defenses against the man wobbled precariously.
    “Thought we might watch the sunset, find a really good restaurant, maybe gamble a little bit, hear music…”
    His voice was as soothing, his accent as balmy as I’d hoped the beach would be. I shelved all decisions of what to