Irresistible Impulse Read Online Free PDF

foxy-faced, brown-skinned girl with a frizzy crew cut regarded him unsympathetically. She was wearing a black jumpsuit adorned with a remarkable number of zippers and pull rings. Seeing that it was her boss’s husband, she stood aside and Karp entered the reception area, a small white room containing two vinyl couches, a table, a magazine rack, with neatly stacked magazines in it, a lamp, several well-tended potted plants, and a desk. On one wall hung framed movie posters, all featuring women in trouble: the original King Kong, Sorry, Wrong Number, Psycho . The other wall held Marlene’s Yale Law School diploma, the private investigator licenses of Marlene and her partner, Harry Bello, and several laminated newspaper and magazine stories featuring Marlene’s excursions into public violence.
    “How’s it going, Sym?” Karp said. Sym the receptionist, one of Marlene’s foundlings. Karp always thought of her as the Rejectionist.
    The girl scowled and mumbled something, and went behind her desk, leaning over to press a button. A buzzer sounded and a door on the room’s opposite side clicked.
    Karp went through it and entered a large, high-ceilinged room nearly forty feet long. Light came in from a single huge arch-topped window to the right, opening on Walker Street. The office furniture was Canal Street Moderne, wooden stuff from the fifties, scarred but serviceable. The floors were wide, polished oak planks, covered in the center by a threadbare, but good, red oriental rug. In the center of that sprawled Karp’s daughter.
    “Hi, Daddy,” she said when she saw him. She was surrounded by school books and notepaper.
    “Hello, Luce,” said Karp. This was their new grown-up relationship. Only a year or so before, Lucy would have greeted Karp’s return home with a yell of joy, a dash, and a leap into his arms. He had still not become used to this ever underestimated tragedy of fatherhood.
    “How was school?”
    “Boring. I have a million math problems. Mrs. Lawrence sucks.”
    “I’d keep that opinion under your hat, if I were you. And keep that kind of language to yourself. Where’s Mom?”
    Lucy motioned with her head to the rear. “Back in the playroom, with Posie. And Them.”
    Karp placed his briefcase on Harry Bello’s vacant desk and walked past Lucy to the right rear corner of the office. The partners had done a good deal of work on the loft since the birth of the twins last year. Despite himself, Karp had to admit it had been neatly done. Marlene had a little semi-private office behind a partition in the corner. There was a full bathroom next to that, and they had drawn a drywall wall across the full width of the loft, behind which were found a playroom-nursery, a small kitchen, and a sort of dormitory partitioned into a half dozen tiny private rooms supplied with junk shop beds and other necessary furniture, repaired and shiny with bright new paint. Sym, the receptionist and general factotum, slept there, as did Posie the nursemaid, and the occasional “guests,” who were generally women on the run and their kids. It was all illegal as hell, which only added to Karp’s low-level irritation.
    Karp went through the door to the nursery. Marlene and Posie were lying on the bright shag rug that occupied the center of the room with Lucy’s Them, the twin boys, constructing towers out of large, colorful foam blocks. The great black dog snored in a corner.
    “Can I play too?” asked Karp.
    “Cancel the 911, he’s here,” said Marlene, standing and giving her husband a peck.
    “Hi, Butch!” said Posie, flashing at him her usual gapped-toothed idiot grin.
    “Dah,” said Isaac, lifting up his arms. Karp stooped and picked up the baby, enjoying the solid heft and talcumy smell.
    “How about you?” This question was directed to the other twin, whose name was Giancarlo, but who was called Zik, to go with Zak, the nickname of his two-minute-older sibling. Karp thought the dual nicknames excessively cute,