Murder in a Nice Neighborhood Read Online Free PDF Page B

Alto. As late as yesterday, completing that article and seeing it in print had been my all-encompassing goal. Smithsonian paid splendidly, especially compared with True Story or Grit. It was a credit to be proud of. And once admitted to their coterie of freelancers, a writer had a good chance of selling them another article. I had several ideas composting in the back of my mind.
    But I couldn’t harness my concentration away from fruitless speculation on this encroaching blot of murder. It didn’t help that my current research was a necessary but rather boring perusal of contemporary documents. Bound volumes of the Mayfield Enterprise were stacked on the table. I meant totrace the feisty little town’s early defiance of Stanford’s edicts, and its later capitulation, through the hints and signs that appeared as early as 1897. I worked away doggedly for an hour before realizing that I didn’t remember anything I’d read. Finally I returned the volumes to the reference desk.
    I drove up Hopkins and made a U-turn, parking beside the Magic Forest, a nice grove of redwoods donated to the city by some arboreal-minded rich person. It took half an hour to tidy the bus. My resentment against the police grew. Why should they have the power to paw through my underwear? Sniggering at my ragged bras was not likely to get them further toward identifying Pigpen Murphy’s killer.
    After everything was in order I collected the stuff I would need and walked through the Magic Forest to the swimming pool. The lunchtime lap swimmers were leaving, so the lanes were uncrowded. I changed in the women’s dressing room, nodding to the regulars with whom I had a passing acquaintance, and went out to submerge my irritation and angst in a good twenty laps.
    Afterward I took a shower, not minding that the water came out in a skin-pummeling blast that had the other women wincing and dancing away. I washed my hair and dressed in clean clothes. I swim nearly every day, no matter what the weather. It costs over thirty dollars a month for the tickets, but the shower makes it well worthwhile. And it’s nice to be in company with others of my sex. The other women don’t even give my faded, second-hand swimsuits a glance.
    Feeling more relaxed, I walked out the gate and headed back around the pool toward my van. There was a police car parked behind it.
    The cop didn’t get out when he spotted me. I slung my bag and rolled-up bundle of wet things into the bus, instead of spreading them on the roof like I usually did for a quick drying session. Nobody hindered me when I got into the driver’s seat. When I pulled out, the cop car pulled out. It  followed me all the way downtown.
    I felt sick again, and underneath that, enraged. Was this my future—constantly being followed by agents of the law?
    Boundaries and restrictions chafe us all, but especially those to whom freedom is as necessary as clean water. It galled me to think that I was expected to hunker down in the stale-urine-scented ambience of the Carver Arms and wait for the police to consent to inform me of what they were doing.
    The parking lot behind the Senior Center was full, but I managed to get a space on the street. The police car cruised slowly past. I saw the cop inside talking on his radio. I spread my wet things out as well as I could in the sun that came through the bus windows, opening one for ventilation. If anyone started poking around, I could see them from the conference room where my workshop was held.
    I was so busy craning around looking for more police persecution that I bumped right into Delores Mitchell as she came out of the Senior Center.
    Delores was perfectly dressed, as usual, in her demure little bank-vice-president’s suit, with her demure little pumps on. It is a sign of pettiness, I suppose, to find a woman irritating merely because she is younger than you, has an important job, and still finds time to volunteer as a teacher at the Senior Center. She ran a class