Plainclothes Naked Read Online Free PDF Page B

filter-ripped Viceroy. When she started talking again, she aimed her gaze straight ahead, at the back of the red minivan in front of them. A bumper sticker on the window said I BRAKE FOR JESUS .
    “What I’m going to show you, I had nothing to do with, okay?” She
    chose her words carefully, “I found it, but it wasn’t something I was supposed to find.”
    “You mean you stole it,” Manny said mildly. Always mildly, when coaching your way through a perp chat. “You didn’t buy or create the thing, you stole the thing.”
    “Technically, yes,” said Tina, with new respect. “But I don’t know who I stole it from. As long as you understand that.”
    “I do,” he said, and slid the manila envelope out of her hand before she changed her mind. She stayed on him, wide-eyed, itching to see his reaction when he pulled what was inside out. But he didn’t want to give her the thrill. Not yet.
    “I’m just wondering, did Marvin have anything to do with what I’m about to look at? Was this one of his scams?”
    “Marvin?”
    Tina rolled down the window and tossed her hardly smoked ciga rette onto somebody’s lawn. It looked like AstroTurf, with bald spots. “Marvin had nothing to do with this,” she said. “Marvin was an acci dent.”
    “I’ve had a few of those,” Manny sighed, catching himself when he realized just what she might think he was saying. “I mean, I’ve been in a relationship with the wrong person, I don’t mean I’ve been in a rela tionship with them and left them slumped in a bowl of Grape-Nuts.”
    “Lucky Charms,” said Tina, “but I hear what you’re saying.” She met his gaze in a way that made his brain buzz. “When it comes to romance, you’re a fuck-up, too.”
    Manny hadn’t exactly ever looked in the mirror and yelped this at himself, but hearing it now, it sounded true.
    “Well,” he said, “one divorce, a handful of quasimonogamous nightmares, and here I am, getting cozy with a murder suspect. I’d say my track record speaks for itself.”
    Tina turned away, and Manny had a feeling she was staring at her own reflection in the passenger window, or staring at his. When she spoke again her voice was flatter, somewhere between weary and serene. “I always start out liking guys for one thing, and when I find out the thing I liked them for isn’t real, I sort of hang around pretend ing it is—or trying to make it that way. Like with Marvin. When I met him, he was this wild-eyed entrepreneur type. The guy had all kinds of
    ideas. He was making crazy money off them. I thought he was a genius.”
    “Was he?”
    “Sometimes,” said Tina. “Other times he was a total Mongoloid. When he made some dough on one crackpot idea, he’d blow it all on three other ones. His new thing, he was an on-line money guru. Liter ally. He videoed himself in loincloth and turban, like Gandhi with a potbelly, giving financial advice. Then he switched from investment tips to chanting for money. He cooked up these special mantras.”
    “Om nyoho renge cash?”
    “Basically. Except we didn’t have any money, which didn’t say much for his cash-chanting efficiency. I could never pin him down, though. He was so enthusiastic, you just kind of wanted everything to work. That’s what I loved about him. Until.. .”
    She faltered, and Manny had to prompt her. “Until?”
    “Until he started chanting through his nose, and I had to listen to him snuffle and Om all day like a monk with a harelip. That’s what put me over the edge. Hangovers are bad enough without Hindu sound effects.”
    Manny’s ears burned, the way they did when people’s words slipped into the Red Zone: when they were confessing, whether they knew it or not. The air between them had gone electric.
    “There’s always something like that,” he said, too casually, “some thing you don’t expect that comes along and changes everything.”
    Tina rested the tip of one forefinger on the back of his wrist. No more than that,