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

thousand dollars in cash. You know what I had when I was twenty? A suit with two pair of pants, and one pair had a hole in them. Who knows nowadays? How’d he strike you, this kid? What was your impression of him?”
    “He was well dressed, both times I saw him. Jacket and tie, looked very preppy, in fact. Dark hair, brown eyes, well built—looked like an athlete. Or at least someone who used his body a lot and took good care of it.”
    “What address did he give you? Did he give you a home address?”
    “I don’t remember it offhand. It was out on Stone Crab Key. He said he was living in a condo out on Stone Crab.”
    “You know how much that condo was costing him, Matthew? The one where we found him dead last night? He was renting it for twelve hundred clams a—God forgive me, I’ll never mention clams again as long as I live. Twelve hundred a month. The resident manager said he’d been living there since the beginning of June, renting from a guy up in Pittsburgh. That’s already thirty-sixhundred he’s laid out since June, not to mention the security deposit. He was pretty rich, this kid, huh?”
    “I would guess so.”
    “I wonder how he got so rich,” Bloom said. “Maybe that’s what the killer was after. The apartment was a shambles, clothes thrown all over the floor, upholstery slashed, bed tossed—looks to me like somebody was searching for something. Maybe it was the thirty-six K, huh? And maybe he found it. The cash McKinney would have needed at the closing. You said it was set for next month sometime, didn’t you?”
    “Yes. September second.”
    “Mm,” Bloom said, and nodded. “Well, I’ll be going out to talk to his mother in just a little while, her name was in his address book. I’ll let you know if the kid came into any big money recently.” He smiled and said, “You think he won the sweepstakes, maybe?”

    My partner Frank said it served me right. My partner Frank said it did not pay to get into fights over women. My partner Frank also said Dale was probably asking for it, the way she was dressed, which almost got my partner Frank into a fight with me , and over a woman at that.
    I told him Dale and I had ended our relationship.
    “You’re a born loser with women,” Frank said. “It’s written all over your face. You have a Second City mentality when it comes to women. I happen to have liked Susan very much,” he said. Susan was my former wife. “Why you took off after that coozy blonde is beyond me,” he said. He was referring to a lady named Agatha Hemmings, who had been the cause of the breakup between Susan and me, and who had since divorced her former husband, remarried, and moved to Tampa. “Not that I don’t like Dale, too,” Frank said. “Very smartlady, Dale, very pretty. But I could see this coming, Matthew, you do not know how to relate to women. One of the things I learned very early on in New York was how to relate to women. You see how beautifully I get along with Leona? That’s because when I was seventeen I wrote down these ten rules on how to get along with women. I still follow those rules, Matthew, they outline how a man is supposed to treat a woman if he expects to enjoy a good relationship with her. How did you treat Dale, Matthew?”
    “That’s none of your business,” I said.
    “Is it my business that you come to work looking like somebody ran you through a meat grinder? Because you got into a fight over a woman you didn’t know how to treat properly?”
    “No, that’s not your business, either.”
    “I thought we were partners,” Frank said.
    “Not in everything,” I said.
    “You look terrible,” he said.
    “I feel terrible.”
    “Why don’t you go home?”
    “I have work to do.”
    “You’ll scare away all our clients. Would you like me to write down my rules for you?”
    “No, I don’t think so.”
    “I realize the horse is already gone, and there’s no sense locking the barn door,” Frank said, “but there’ll be