Life's Work Read Online Free PDF Page B

"you're coming with us. And if you aren't who you say you are, I'm going to charge you with obstructing justice."
    I looked back at Laurel, who was still standing at the top of the entryway.
    "Do me a favor?" I called to her.
    She stamped her foot. "You lied to me. You said you weren't a cop."
    A couple of the cops laughed.
    "Call Hugh Petrie," I said. I spelled his name for her and gave her his number. "Tell him to meet Harry Stoner at Station X."
    "I don't like this," she said. "Just do it, Laurel. Please."
    The cop with the billy club grabbed me by the arm and pulled me to the patrol car. "Who the hell is that monster?" he said as he stuffed me into the back seat alongside Otto.
    "Just a guy who's had a bad day," I said.
    Around two o'clock that morning, Hugh Petrie visited me in the Station X lockup in the basement of City Hall. I'd been there for some time, sitting in a holding tank with assorted other drunks and sad cases. They'd taken Otto to University Hospital to have his head patched. Me, they'd thrown in jail -after the cop I'd tangled with discovered that the badge I'd shown him was a ringer.
    I'd been talking to a drunk for better than an hour when Petrie finally showed up. The drunk, whose name was Elmer, had been telling me his philosophy of life, which mostly consisted of the single admonition, Don't forget to eat.
    "It's when you forget to eat that they start slipping by."
    "What?" I asked him.
    He looked at me piteously. "Why the days, man," he said. "The days."
    "Oh, them," I said. The days.
    Of late, Elmer had had to remind himself to eat, because his wife had gotten fed up and left him, and his children wouldn't speak to him, either. He lived off his sister, a good Catholic woman who prayed constantly for his redemption and turned the other cheek when he filched beer money from her purse. Elmer thought she was a hypocrite because of the priests.
    "I say to her, `Those priests of yours, they have a pickme-up of a morning. What the hell d'you think they got in those cups? Pepsi-Cola?' That shuts her down."
    He was a card, Elmer.
    He had just begun to explain the virtues of buying eyeglasses at Walgreen's rather than at K mart, when Petrie walked up to the cage. Elmer glanced at Petrie's iron jawed face and paled. "Don't forget to eat, Harry," he said in a stricken voice, and retreated a discreet distance. I was still a little loaded, so I laughed.
    "Howdy, Hugh."
    Petrie stared at me for a moment. His shirt was misbuttoned at the collar and his cheeks were dark with a day's growth of beard, but he still looked tough and businesslike in a sleepy, disheveled way. He wore a felt hat over his forehead, shading it sharply the way his brow shaded the rest of his face.
    "What happened?" he said softly.
    "I don't think Otto liked being cut. He went a little nuts in a downtown bar."
    Petrie nodded, as if he'd heard the story before. "What was he doing in the bar?"
    "Looking for Parks. Or so he said."
    "Does he know where Bill is?"
    I shrugged. "Apparently he thought he was at the Waterhole. He was pretty drunk, and feeling sorry for every football player who ever butted heads with management. I'll tell you one thing -he isn't too crazy about you guys at the moment."
    "The feeling is mutual," Petrie said. He peered through the bars at Thursday night's collection of losers.
    "How'd you end up in here?"
    "A cop was using Otto's head for batting practice. I stepped in."
    "From what I've been told, Otto did a little practicing of his own."
    "He got in his licks," I said.
    "Maybe we shouldn't have cut him, after all," Petrie said dryly. "My lawyer's arranging for your release. You should be out of here shortly." He wrinkled his brow and the brim of his hat kissed the bridge of his nose. "By the way, who is Laurel Jones?"
    "A girl I met at the Waterhole."
    He gawked at me in disbelief. "You gave a girl you met at that bar my private number?"
    "I didn't know how long it would be before I could get to a phone," I said. "And I