Ms. Simon Says Read Online Free PDF Page A

mail room here, and then make a sweep of your apartment. It won’t take too long, assuming they don’t find anything.” He pointed to a little grouping of chairs on the far side of the lobby. “Why don’t you just sit and relax for a minute?”
    She looked in the direction of the expensive cream leather club chairs and for a moment she felt so exhausted that she could hardly keep standing. In a matter of a few hours, her entire world seemed to have changed beyond all recognition. She must’ve swayed or something, because she immediately felt a steadying hand on her back and heard Callahan say, “Come on. Let’s get you in a chair.”
    Shelby sat, trying to concentrate on the copy of today’s
Daily Mirror
that someone had left on the table beside her chair. The headlines read like old news to her since they didn’t include this morning’s series of letter bomb incidents. Those would be all over tomorrow’s edition.
    She turned to the inside pages and read her own column—twice—with a critical eye, trying to figure out if her words were in any way inflammatory or if they could offend anyone to the point that they’d want to blow her up.
    There certainly wasn’t anything offensive in this column. She’d written it just a few days ago, advising Over the Hill in Oklahoma to move heaven and earth in order to pursue her dream of a college education despite the fact that Over the Hill considered herself too old at the age of forty-two. In her encouraging reply, Shelby had included phone numbers and Web sites to assist the woman in her quest for tuition money. Also, in a rare personal note, Shelby wrote that her very own mother had started a business—a very successful one—at the ripe old age of fifty-something.
    She smiled weakly, wondering if maybe the mysterious letter bomber was her mother, taking issue with her daughter for using her as an example of an old dog capable of learning new tricks. Nah. Her mother was enormously proud of her midlife success and didn’t hesitate to tell anyone about it, sometimes at great length.
    This would probably be her last column for a while, Shelby thought. She wondered if her readers would miss her advice. What if they got out of the habit of reading her, or while she was on hold, what if they got used to reading “Ask Alice” instead? Now there was a depressing thought. Alice, despite the matronly picture that accompanied the popular column, was really Alvin Wexler, a sixty-year-old curmudgeon whose “advice” was really just an excuse to parade his numerous alleged degrees in the social sciences. Ms. Simon wrote rings around him, in Shelby’s opinion anyway.
    Just then she heard the elevator doors whooshing open, and out stepped her neighbor, Mo Pachinski. He’d traded his electric blue velour outfit for a gray sharkskin suit that was almost iridescent, complemented by a dark purple shirt and matching tie. After he exited the elevator, Mo scanned the lobby as if he half expected somebody with a submachine gun to be lurking behind one of the potted ficus trees. Then he spotted Shelby, smiled the way a piranha might smile at the sight of human flesh, and—after shooting his purple French cuffs—sauntered toward her.
    But Mick Callahan got to her first. He practically sprinted across the marble floor to insert himself between Shelby and the oncoming Mo, who looked startled for a second, then grinned.
    “How’s it hangin’, Lieutenant?” Mo asked. He shot his cuffs again. It must’ve been a nervous tic, or else some involuntary reaction to a sudden rush of testosterone.
    Callahan, whose plaid flannel cuffs were rolled halfway up his rangy forearms and therefore unshootable, merely shifted his shoulders in a macho, John Wayne kind of way. “What’s up, Morris? When’d you get out?”
    “Christmas last year. Hey, I’d’ve sent you a card if I thought you cared.”
    “Yeah. Yeah.”
    The smirk on the mobster’s face seemed to soften just a bit then when he