Rainy City Read Online Free PDF Page B

distant. Kathy’s premonitions were beginning to worry me. I’m not easily frightened, but she was seeing something in conjunction with this family that didn’t belong, something ugly, and I didn’t know if I wanted to find out what it was. Years ago, I had wanted to know everything. Needed to know. Now, I realized there were some things you were better off not discovering.
    North and over eighty miles distant, Bellingham was a small city, not mentioned much in Seattle. The central feature of the burg was Western Washington State College. A long time ago I had seriously contemplated enrolling there.
    I could have telephoned Mary Dawn Crowell, but you never find out as much on the phone. Besides, I had nothing else to do. The drive would give me a chance to think things through. My buggy was a six-cylinder and red-lined at seventy. I saw no reason to strain the old girl. I kept the needle a hair past the double nickels. It showered most of the way. It was pouring in Bellingham.
    Mary Dawn Crowell lived near the heart of the city in a condominium that had clean lines and freshly planted, plastic-looking shrubbery in front. She wasn’t home. The manager, a congenial grandmother-type with gray hair and gray eyes and gray dentures, was more than helpful to the tall stranger who had motored all the way up from Seattle in the rain squalls.
    She escorted me up carpeted steps to the third floor where we spoke to one of Mary Dawn Crowell’s neighbors, a hunched-over gentleman named Felton who must have immigrated from Latvia or some other obscure country. He wore a shabby suit, though it was readily apparent that he hadn’t gone out and wasn’t planning to. He lived in suits. He probably had two of them and rotated every Tuesday. He told me Crowell had taken a Sunday drive with some oldsters and would be home in the late afternoon.
    I conned her phone number out of the manager and drove around looking for someplace to wait. It was just after one o’clock.
    I grabbed a hamburger at a greasy spoon opposite a shopping mall. Strolling across the street to the mall, I window-shopped and watched the young girls in tight jeans. I watched the old girls in tight jeans, too, and the matrons in tight jeans, but mostly the young girls in tight jeans. Everyone was dressed the same. Same designer denims with the same decals on their butts, same baseball caps with the same logos on their brains, same reds and blues, same cuts and styles.
    One man trundled past wearing my shoes. Another came past in my coat. In the parking lot outside, there were at least two trucks identical to mine. It made you wonder how many had your brain.
    I bought a thick Sunday paper and found a movie theater playing Body Heat. I’d seen the flick, but I could easily tolerate it again. After the murder, I slipped out to the lobby and phoned Mary Dawn Crowell. No reply. That particular flick always made me thirsty. I floundered back to my seat with a tall cool Seven-Up and evaporated into the celluloid miracle.
    It was half past five before a woman who might have been Crowell parked a shiny new road-gray Buick in back of the condominium and scurried through the pattering rain to the glass doors. I allowed her enough time to get inside and take care of business before I climbed out of the truck. I stalked through the wet and thumbed the buzzer next to 304.
    “Yes?”
    “I’m Thomas Black, a friend of your niece’s, Melissa Nadisky.”
    “Who?”
    “Melissa Crowell? Your niece. She married a fellow named Nadisky.”
    “Yes, of course. Is Melissa with you?”
    “Not today.”
    “Come on up.” The door buzzed and I went in. The joint smelled of new carpets.
    Mary Dawn was a spicy old gal, a spinster or widow by the looks of her clothing, which was thirty years out of date. The world was full of short little mannish women like her. She had a wide, squat body and a broad face that seemed to get broader toward the chin, as if the wide jaw belonged on someone else.