Mallets Aforethought Read Online Free PDF

I hadn’t yet discovered the Johnnie Cochran rule of preparing old houses for painting: “If the wood is grey, the paint won’t stay.”
    Finally, I intended to caulk
under
the frames, squeezing the seal tight to form something more durable than the current temporary fix. For a while I’d considered also packing the screw holes with plastic wood, since removing the screws would strip the holes smooth, rendering them useless. But the best plan was to drill them a little bigger and tap in dowel pins; that way there would be at least some good wood in those old windows.
    And you never know, I thought as I sat there watching the torrential rain. That little bit of good wood might end up being what held the house up, if push came to shove.
    There was plenty I could do while I waited for Colgate but the more I thought about it, the more it seemed like a bad idea to leave those bodies alone until he’d seen them. So finally when he didn’t show up I left a note on my back door and went over.
    No one was there, but the rain had slowed down to a drizzle. I went in and grabbed some tools. The front steps were broken and if teams of investigators were going to be tramping in and out of here, it seemed only charitable to make it safe for them.
    Fortunately I’d been eyeing those steps for a while, with special attention to the old black cast-iron railing. I’d soaked the bolts holding it on with WD-40 every day for a week. So now when I dropped a hex wrench on them they unscrewed cooperatively.
    Next I pulled the railing off and went to work on the wooden treads, which despite their rot didn’t come off as cooperatively at all. Eventually I bashed them up enough so that I could get at the nail shafts holding them on with a coping saw:
zip, zop.
    Last came the hard part. Usually when you replace stair treads you’ve prepared yourself by measuring and cutting the new ones. I by contrast had prepared by noticing some old boards and figuring I could jury-rig something.
    This plan, it turned out, might have been too optimistic, especially since I only had the coping saw, no tape measure or pencil, and nowhere to prop the boards while I cut them.
    On the plus side, the boards did turn out to be wide enough. So I just laid them on the risers, nailed them down, and cut the ends off. The coping saw was most emphatically not the proper tool for the job. Fortunately, however, I am naturally equipped with the one tool that is most essential for old-house fix-up.
    That is, bonehead stubbornness. I even had a strategy for getting the railing back on without a drill, using a nail to make the pilot holes for the wood screws.
    The trouble was, I couldn’t keep the railing straight and turn the screws back in at the same time. If I held the railing up I couldn’t reach the screw holes, and when I could reach the screw holes the railing overbalanced itself and fell over, pulling the screws out.
    So after several attempts I abandoned this portion of the step-repair program. Still I considered it reasonably successful, since even without a railing no eager-beaver homicide detective was going to hustle up those steps on his way to a nice juicy murder case, and end up instead in the hospital with a broken ankle.
    And in a bad mood. The last thing we needed around here was a cop of any kind in a bad mood.
    We didn’t get one, either.
    At first.
     
     
    “State or federal?” my father asked two hours later. I was still waiting for Trooper Colgate and after hanging around at Harlequin House for a while longer I’d decided to come back home.
    “State.” The crime, I meant, that George had been in trouble over, back when he wasn’t very much older than Sam was now.
    It was the event George didn’t like talking about. “Trial or plea?” He was a lawbreaker from way back himself, my old man, and he knew the ropes.
    “Pled,” I replied. “Took it for someone else. Drugs belonged to his friend, who had a sheet already, would’ve gone to