Missionary Stew Read Online Free PDF

tossed, unopened, into the wastebasket. There were also nineteen pieces of junk mail, which were also discarded, and two letters from the American Express Company, forwarded from Paris, which he assumed to be rude demands for payment and which he also tossed away unread, unopened.
    The one letter Citron did open was prettily addressed to him by hand in brown ink. It was an invitation to an American Civil Liberties Union fund-raiser in Bel-Air. Citron assumed the ACLU had somehow got his name and address from Amnesty International.
    Citron turned to look up at the clock on the post-office wall. He still owned no watch and sometimes doubted that he ever would again. The post-office clock read 4:32. The ACLU reception with its promise of free food and drink was from 5:00 to 7:30. Citron found the publicwashroom and inspected himself in the mirror. He had clipped his gunfighter mustache the day before, just after one of the Cadillac People had given his gray-streaked brown hair a free trim along with a fanciful story about having once been Sinatra's favorite barber in Tahoe.
    As for clothes, Citron was wearing a clean blue button-down shirt, a worn but still good tweed jacket, faded jeans, and presentable brown loafers. It was a uniform that in Los Angeles would enable him to pass for either a sincere probation officer or a rich producer.
    At the ACLU fund-raiser in Bel-Air, Citron managed to put away a quarter of a pound of assorted cheese, a half-dozen cocktail sausages, perhaps fifteen Triscuits, and two glasses of white wine before he was discovered by Craigie Grey, the actress, questioned sharply, and hired on the spot as the resident manager of her Malibu beach apartment building.
    Upon turning thirty-two in 1971, Craigie Grey had taken a long bleak look at herself in a three-way mirror and a week later put every dime she could raise into a down payment on the two-story, eight-unit beach apartment building on the Pacific Coast Highway a block or so from the pier in what was generally conceded to be one of Malibu's less ritzy sections.
    The redheaded film actress bought the apartment building as both an investment and a hedge against what she called the three Fs—Fat, Fifty, and Forgotten. She also bought shrewdly and cheaply, bargaining the price down to less than three-quarters of a million. Eleven years later it was still worth four, possibly five times what she paid for it. Some said six.
    On that unseasonably warm November evening when she hired Citron (despite his murmured protestations that his inability to fix anything broken, either mechanical or spiritual, just might border on criminal negligence), Craigie Grey raised a glass of white wine to her broad, grin-prone mouth, sipped it, and stared at him over the glass's rim with her bluebonnet-blue eyes. A native of Longview in East Texas, which she had left thirty years ago when she was twelve (or sixto hear her tell it now), her birthplace could still be detected in the softly twanged vowels that glided in and out of her speech.
    “How long were you in there, all in all?” she said, lowering her glass.
    “All in all, not quite thirteen months,” Citron said.
    Her next question was predictable—at least to Citron. But first there was to be the inevitable hesitation while the battle with prurience was fought. As usual, prurience won.
    “Was he really a cannibal like they all said?”
    Citron shrugged his answer, or lack of it, as he almost always did when asked that particular question. He reached for another Triscuit on which he placed a large chunk of cheese that turned out to be Monterey jack. They were standing next to the table where the wine and cheese were being served. Craigie Grey was there to make the fund-raiser's principal speech. Citron, of course, had come for the grub.
    “You don’t like to talk about it,” Craigie Grey said in a tone that mingled sympathy with disappointment.
    “It's not my favorite topic,” Citron admitted.
    Craigie Grey