Jack and the Beanstalk (Matthew Hope) Read Online Free PDF Page A

Who makes more money, fashion models or guys who write diet books? Cops sure don’t,” he said, and grinned. “It’s good to see you, Matthew. I’m sorry I called so early—”
    “That’s all right,” I said.
    “I wouldn’ta called at all if I’d known about your trouble last night. I’ll have all the blues looking for those punks, we’ll find them, don’t worry. Charlie and Jeff, huh? Sounds like a pair of vaudeville comics. Some comics. They did a nice job on you, Matthew. I’ll have to teach you to fight dirty.”
    “I’d love to learn,” I said.
    “Are you serious? Come down the gym one night, I’ll kick you in the balls a few times. Are you serious?”
    “I’m very serious.”
    “Good, we’ll make a date. About McKinney,” he said. “I just got a call from the coroner’s office, they’ll be sending the written report up later. McKinney was stabbed or slashed fourteen times, somebody did a very nice job on him, I can tell you that. What do you know about him, Matthew? I’d appreciate anything you can tell me. When did you last see him? Because in police work, when we catch a homicide, there’s a rule we follow, we call it the twenty-four P-and-P—does this sort of stuff interest you?”
    “It does.”
    “’Cause some people it doesn’t,” Bloom said. “What it is, P-and-P stands for past and present. The first thing we try to do is track down the past twenty-four hours in the victim’s life, because that way we can work up a timetable on where he went and who he saw and what he did and maybe get a lead that way. That’s the twenty-four past . At the same time, we try to work as fastas we can in the twenty-four hours following the murder—that’s the twenty-four present —because that’s the only time we’ve got a slight edge. The killer hasn’t had time to cover too many tracks, he doesn’t know how much we already know, or even if we’ve found the body yet. Like that. Very important time, those first twenty-four hours. After that, it can get mighty cold mighty fast, Matthew, even down here where you can melt like a snowman. The Twenty-four P-and-P, live and learn, am I right? Did you see McKinney anytime during the past twenty-four hours?”
    “I saw him last Friday at two o’clock.”
    “Okay, tell me about it,” Bloom said. “You won’t mind if I make a few notes, will you?”
    I told him about it.
    Jack McKinney had come into my office sometime in July, recommended by a friend for whom we’d handled a disability claim. McKinney was twenty years old; I’d specifically asked him because he looked much younger, and I wanted to make certain he was legally of age to make a binding contract. In the state of Florida, you’re considered legally capable of making an enforceable contract once you reach the age of eighteen. McKinney showed me his driver’s license to prove that he was indeed twenty, and then he explained that he’d made a handshake deal with a farmer out on Timucuan Point Road to purchase fifteen acres of land midway between Calusa and Ananburg. The farmer’s name was Avery Burrill, and his crop was snapbeans; young Jack McKinney wanted to become a snapbean farmer.
    He told me what the purchase price was—forty thousand dollars—and said he wanted to close the deal as soon as possible, before Burrill changed his mind. Because of the boy’s extreme youth, and because I’d never heard of snapbean farming in this part of the state, I called a man named John Porter, the county extension agent, to get his opinion. Porter informedme that snapbeans were grown mostly on the east coast, in Palm Beach County, and also in South Dade County, in the Homestead area. On the central west coast, here in Calusa, the truck crops were tomatoes, strawberries, escarole, chicory, beets, and some Chinese cabbage—but not snapbeans. He then surprised me by asking if this had anything to do with a man named Avery Burrill.
    It seemed that Burrill had come to him some three