Out on the Rim Read Online Free PDF Page B

kitchen, wearing an old plaid bathrobe. He winked at Stallings, served himself some pie along with a bloody mary, nodded encouragingly, and sat down at the table to eat, drink and listen.
    â€œAll ears?” Stallings said, looking first at Mott, who nodded again, and then at Lydia Mott, noticing not for the first time that she wasn’t nearly as pretty as her older sister. For one thing her face was so mobile and her emotions so transparent that friends and utter strangers liked to tell her their most godawful secrets just to watch the light show her face put on as sympathy, consternation, amazement, concern, grief and joy blazed across it. Stallings often thought his younger daughter’s pathologically forgiving nature made her the perfect mate for a criminal lawyer.
    When he was finished with his tale—a slightly longer version than he had spun Neal Hineline—the awed Lydia Mott whispered, “Oh, my God, Pappy!” She then turned to her husband and said, “What d’you think, sugar?”
    Sugar was short and chunky and thirty-six years old with a curiously unfinished look. Just a few more blows from the DNA chisel and Howard Mott might have looked distinguished, if not exactly handsome. Instead he looked as if he had been put together by someone who hadn’t bothered to read the directions.
    His intimidating half-finished look was complemented by a magnificent mind, not much hair and countersunk black eyes that some thought could peep into souls. He used a silken bass voice to thunder, cajole and produce a rumbling confidential whisper that an often mesmerized jury could easily hear from thirty feet away. He won most of his cases.
    â€œWhat do I think?” Mott said. “I think the shit’s deep and rising.”
    â€œThat’s understood,” Stallings said.

    â€œIt’s also illegal, despite what my brother-in-law, the beloved simpleton, says. I can think of a dozen laws you’d break. But what’s most important is this: nobody ever pays a bagman half a million to deliver five million unless the deal’s dirty.”
    â€œAnother given,” Stallings said.
    â€œBut you’re still going ahead and doing it, aren’t you?” Lydia Mott said.
    Stallings nodded and then said, “But I’m also going to need some help.”
    â€œHandholders,” Mott said.
    â€œYou know any?”
    Mott put the final bite of pie into his mouth, chewed thoughtfully, put down his fork and rose. “Come on upstairs.”
    Stallings followed his son-in-law up the stairs and into a room that held a very old rolltop desk, a couch for Saturday afternoon naps, and an elaborate stereo system to play the operas that were Mott’s passion. He waved Stallings to a chair, sat down at the desk, and began rummaging through its drawers and pigeonholes until he found the business card he wanted.
    Mott read the card, tapped it against a thumbnail, read it again, looked at Stallings for a long moment, turned to the desk, picked up a ballpoint pen and wrote two names on the back of the card.
    â€œThese two guys are probably about what you need,” Mott said as he wrote. “I hear from the usual unimpeachable sources that they’re very good, fairly honest and awfully expensive. You willing to pay?”
    â€œI expect to,” Stallings said.
    Mott again turned to his father-in-law. “The last I heard they were out on the Rim someplace. Hong Kong. Singapore. Bangkok. Malacca. They move around. But this is their stateside contact. Sort of their agent.” He handed the card to Stallings who noticed it was engraved and that it read:
    Â 
    Â 
    MAURICE OVERBY
    House-sitter to the Stars

    The only thing on the card was a phone number with a 213 area code that Stallings knew meant Los Angeles. He looked up at Mott. “How’s he pronounce it? Maurice or Morris?”
    â€œClose friends and slight acquaintances usually call him Otherguy. Now