Noir Read Online Free PDF Page B

cotton bandage and when she was done your helmeted head bobbed heavily on your shoulders; you felt like lying down but you were afraid of not getting up again. You look like a swami, Mr. Noir, she said, sniffing the wet clothes, then turned to leave.
    Wait a minute, Blanche. I can’t go around like this. What if someone comes?
    She stared at you thoughtfully over her horn-rimmed spectacles, set down the wet clothes, reached under her woolen skirt. Look the other way, Mr. Noir. You sipped at the tea, careful not to tip your head back for fear of it falling off. The tea tasted good; it would have tasted better with something in it, but that was a Blanche no-no. All right, you can look now. You can cover up your unmentionables with these. You’d always thought of Blanche wearing practical white cotton drawers or one of those elastic corsetty things, but what she handed you was a pair of pink silk panties with little flowers stitched on them. The glossy silk felt good but they were a tight fit and some of your unmentionables hung out. She tried to help you push them in, and she could get one side in, but when she tried to push the other side in, the first one popped out. The whole exercise was making you lightheaded.
    Leave it, sweetheart. If anyone asks, I’ll say I’m airing out my hemorrhoids.
    She wasn’t gone five minutes, you were still staggering about the room in the tight undies with your head dipping and weaving, fighting the urge to fall out on the sofa, when the widow turned up. Mr. Noir, she said, as though somewhat exasperated. I never know what to expect. Are you really a private detective, or do I have the wrong address?

    YOU’D THINK: LIVE AND LEARN. ONCE BURNED, TWICE shy, all that. If history starts to repeat, you can stop it if you want. Bend it. Or walk away from it. But here you are again in the Star Diner, getting shitfaced from the milk dispenser with Snark after another belly-churning chili-and-doughnut repast, hurting still from last night’s waterfront drubbing and breathless from your run from your interrupted railway freight-yard meet with Rats, and listening, while the old white-bearded panhandler peers in from outside, to the newest positions Snark’s contortionist wife has treated him to.
    Sounds great.
    Yeah, except for when she gets so twisted she gets us locked up. Then it can be a long sweaty night.
    You nod, trying to imagine this (the contortionist wife is easy enough, but not Snark), and thank him for pulling you out of the drink down at pier four last night. But what was he doing down there?
    We were called there on a tip and interrupted a murder. Yours. You were completely out of it but still thrashing away, and by the time we’d got a grip and fished you out, the bozo trying to do you had got away.
    The Hammer. There’s a body down there. On a yacht.
    There are bodies everywhere, Snark says with a certain glum zest, dipping a pistachio-crusted doughnut filled with grape jelly in his whiskey, then putting the whole thing in his mouth. Last night we caught a guy having his old lady for supper, he says, his cheeks bulging with chewed doughnut and oozing purple jelly. She’d been carved up, packaged in butcher’s paper, neatly labeled and stored in the refrigerator meat drawer.
    Blue stopped by today, Snark. Wants to arrest me for stealing some toy soldiers.
    Yeah, I saw him when he left. Expected him to come back with you. Better lay low. He’s gunning for you.
    He let me go. Not sure why.
    Must have thought he could use you somehow.
    I think he did. You hit the milk dispenser again. There are a lot of things you want to know but you’re here mainly because you thought Snark might know something about the widow and what happened to her body, especially after what Rats just told you about some mystery as to where it was found, the drawing of it. But all Snark is able to tell you is that he thinks goggle-eyes down at the morgue knows something.
    The Creep? I already talked to