Lethally Blond Read Online Free PDF Page A

could tell by the expression on his face that his hand had touched something unexpected.
    “There’s a hard thing at the bottom.” He tossed several T-shirts and pairs of running shorts onto the floor and then slowly lifted out a plastic storage container, this one the size of a shoebox. We could see through the transparent sides that there were envelopes inside. I felt a weird tingle go through my body.
    We glanced at each other, both of us nearly bug-eyed.
    “We better take a look,” I announced. “Since he’s hiding it, it could mean something.”
    As we carried the box across the hall to the living room, I felt dread gaining on me. Could the contents be tied to Tom’s disappearance? Was I about to find records of cocaine deals carried out throughout Manhattan?
    With the box on his lap, Chris lifted the lid and flicked through the envelopes.
    “It’s mostly from chicks,” he said. “Jeez, we’ve found his love letter stash.”
    “Okay, we better put it back,” I told him.
    “Hold on,” he said, lifting out one parcel of at least thirty cards bound by a fat rubber band. He tugged an envelope from the pack and drew a card from the envelope. “That’s what I thought,” he said, glancing at the few words scribbled at the bottom. “These are all from this actress he was seeing before Harper—Blythe. Blythe Hammell or Hamlin, I think. She used to call a ton when I was staying here, and it drove him nuts. After a while, he just started letting all her calls go to voice mail or his answering machine.”
    “So he just wasn’t, as they say, into her?”
    “He was
initially,
I think. Tom’s a pretty private guy overall, so I don’t know everything that went on between them, but I take it they had a fairly fun romp in the beginning. But she started getting real possessive after that. He tried to break it off, and she just kept hounding him. She sounded like a bit of a whack job to me. Of course, half the actresses you meet are—and besides, Tom has this way of seeing everybody’s good side.”
    “Is that how they came into contact—through an acting job?”
    “Yeah, she’s part of that theater company he’s involved with—the Chaps Theatre.”
    “Well, if she was a whack job, we’d better check her out,” I said, sitting next to him on the couch and pulling a few of the cards out of their envelopes. Some of the ones from Blythe were greeting cards—silly ones with kitty cats and monkeys as well as sexy ones loaded with innuendo—all signed “Blythe” or “B.” Others were just note cards with simple messages in a bold, dramatic script: “I’m missing you,” for instance, and “Let me cook you something
delicious
tonight.” According to the postmarks, a card had arrived every couple of days through the summer up until about six weeks ago, which meant about a month before Tom had disappeared. The last card had a picture of a pug on the front and was blank inside except for “Why don’t you call anymore? B.”
    “July thirty-first,” I said, pointing to the postmark. “Do you think she gave up the fight then?”
    “Yeah, that sounds about right. I remember him saying something about finally having her out of his hair.”
    I took out my notebook and jotted down the return address on East 5th Street.
    “By the way, where’s his mail from the past two weeks?” I asked.
    “Huh?” Chris asked distractedly. He was staring at something still in the box. “Oh, the post office has it because it was starting to pile up. Of course, they won’t release it to anyone but Tom.”
    “What are you looking at?” I asked quietly, aware suddenly that something was up.
    “This,” he said, picking up a blue envelope. It was made of really heavy stock, the kind of stationery you buy at Cartier. He flicked up the flap and withdrew the note card inside.
    There was just one sentence written in blue black fountain pen: “When you fuck me, it takes a week for my toes to uncurl.” And then the name,