Name Withheld : A J.p. Beaumont Mystery (9780061760907) Read Online Free PDF Page A

with a matching pair of high-heeled, backless slippers. The outfit looked as though it had been copied from a 1930s Bette Davis movie. So did the foot-long cigarette holder.
    â€œYou must be Detective Beaumont.”
    I nodded, handing her one of my cards. After giving me a coy look, she immediately tucked the card into her bra. “Won’t you come in?”
    I stepped into a black-and-white room: white leather couch, chair, and carpet; black lacquered furniture. Huge black-and-white oils of nothing recognizable covered the walls. A silver tray laden with a french-press coffeepot, coffee cups, saucers, and spoons as well as cream and sugar was waiting on the coffee table.
    â€œWon’t you sit down?” Johnny offered. “And how do you take your coffee, black or with cream and sugar?”
    â€œBlack will be fine,” I said.
    Johnny motioned me onto the couch and then took a seat on a nearby straight-backed chair. Shesat primly erect, shoulders not touching the chair, knees close together, legs demurely crossed at the ankle. And that was part of what gave her away. Modern-day ordinary women seldom pay that much attention to the finer points of posture and deportment. Not only that, the hand that passed me my cup and saucer wasn’t exactly fragile and feminine.
    Robe and slippers be damned, Johnny Bickford wasn’t a woman at all, or rather, wasn’t all woman.
    â€œI meant to go jogging first thing this morning,” he/she was saying. “Here it is, only the second of January and I’m already breaking one of my New Year’s resolutions, but I just couldn’t bear to go back down the waterfront after what happened there yesterday. The problem is, I’m not in good enough shape to run up and down the hills in this neighborhood. Besides, I barely slept last night. Nightmares, you know. That poor man. Do you have any idea who he is?”
    â€œNot yet. We’re working on it. Tell me, Johnny, where were you when you first saw the body?”
    â€œI had just come up through Myrtle Edwards Park, and I was more than a little winded.” Johnny laughed, the sound more of a donkey’s bray than anything else. “That’s not entirely true. I’m fairly new to this jogging thing, and I went out on Pier Seventy to watch the water traffic and to catch my breath. I was coming back down the pier to head home when we saw him. He wasn’t floating, really. He was sort of pushed up againstone of those old dead-head logs down along the edge of the water. Then a tugboat or something came by, fairly close to shore. The wake was enough to jar him loose. He disappeared under the dock.”
    â€œYou said we . Was someone there with you?”
    â€œThere was a lady in a wheelchair on the dock with me. I mean, we were on the dock at the same time, although we weren’t actually together, you see. She was the one who spotted the body first, although I was the one who called it in because I was the one with a phone in my pocket.”
    â€œThis other lady, did you get her name?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œAnd you called from your cell phone?”
    Johnny nodded. “I carry my trusty little cellular phone with me at all times. I used to live up on Capital Hill, you see,” he/she said. “Up there, I worried about gay bashing, especially late at night. Downtown here, it’s mostly ordinary muggers and homeless lowlife panhandlers. They don’t give a damn if you’re gay or straight. I’d have to call them equal-opportunity criminals,” Johnny said with another raucous hoot of laughter.
    â€œI guess you would,” I agreed, although I didn’t find the joke particularly funny.
    There was a momentary lull in the conversation. Johnny Bickford looked thoughtful. “I suppose the poor man committed suicide, didn’t he? Jumped off a bridge or something? You have tobe feeling terribly low to just go ahead and end it all that