No Good to Cry Read Online Free PDF

apartment that looked out on Dumpsters and broken asphalt pavement. Since our move into this space from the storied Colt Building, now gloriously gentrified, he spent a lot of time in the office. Despite the climb on narrow, creaky stairs, he liked the expanse of roll-up windows that front the avenue. “I can see the late-night crowd getting nasty ’cause KFC is out of crispy chicken.”
    Our building was a three-story 1920s office building with cracked cement foundation, crumbling brick, water stains on the flaky plaster ceiling. Yes, too many insensitive landlords had slathered hideous green deck paint on the walls or used a cheap varnish on the old oak floorboards, and, yes, when hurricane-force winds or blizzards rattled the windows, there arose the feeling that Doomsday had finally arrived—and not a minute too soon.
    On the first floor was an ancient lawyer-owner named Riverbend—that, unfortunately, was his first name, his parents obviously dipsomaniacs—whose clients were old-guard Hartford WASP gentry who lived in ivy-covered mansions on Prospect. On the third floor was his dilettantish son, Herman, who ran some fly-by-night video production operation, grinding out indie films no one wanted to see, especially the juries at Sundance, but occasionally the scattershot cinematographer was thrown a few bucks by his father to tape lawyerly depositions in court cases.
    Gaddy Associates occupied the second floor—above the awful stillness of the first-floor gentility yet below the raucous MTV soundtrack baseline that drummed overhead.
    Walking into my office, Hank right behind me, I balked: Jimmy had obviously been spending time in the rooms because the noxious odor of cigars covered the room like a fog. His cigarettes I could tolerate—but his cheap Panama cigars did me in. In that instant I flashed to the man lost under crisp white sheets at Hartford Hospital. I turned to face Hank. “Smells like Jimmy.”
    â€œOnly the cigars. What’s missing is the familiar whiff of pepperoni in the air.”
    But his words were swallowed. Bothered by Jimmy’s absence, he stepped close to Jimmy’s small pine desk by the front window, and his hands rustled some of the papers on the desk. He breathed in and crumpled up his face as he picked up a note and handed it to me. Jimmy’s barely legible scrawl: “Call Rick. That fool left the damn lights on again.”
    I smiled.
    â€œLet’s go,” I told Hank.
    Hank was grinning. “Don’t forget to turn off the lights.”
    Late in the afternoon Farmington was jam-packed with cars maneuvering around illegally double-parked cars that clogged the avenue. At a bus stop three old black women dressed in winter cloth coats chatted and laughed, though one kept stepping into the street to check whether a bus was near. A young woman gingerly carried two cups of Starbucks coffee as she headed into a laundromat, talking in a high-pitched voice into the microphone she’d attached inches from her mouth. Two schoolgirls walked shoulder to shoulder, each one intently reading her phone. One girl raced her fingers over the keyboard, furious texting. That impressed me. I texted with one finger, the index finger of my right hand, at a pace that allowed empires to rise and fall.
    Hank pointed to the crowds. “Had to be witnesses, no?”
    A teenager pushed by him, banged into his side, mumbled a curse.
    â€œHere.” I stopped walking. “This is where it happened.”
    We stood next to a low, foot-high wrought-iron fence fronting the entrance to a small Italian coffee and pastry shop. A neon sign, flickering in daylight. Roma Bakery. The display window, set back ten or so feet from the sidewalk, featured replicas of ornate wedding cakes.
    I pointed to a dried reddish-brown blot on the iron post. “This is where Ralph hit his head.” On the sidewalk the familiar chalk outline of a body, a cop’s rapid