Sandy Gingras - Lola Polenta 01 - Swamped Read Online Free PDF Page A

this.
    “Go out on a limb, if it breaks off, fly,” I remember it said. Fly? That’s the trouble with these self-help things. No specificity. Well, I tell myself, just don’t fall down. Just don’t be a dead stupid victim bird on the ground.
    When I get home, I walk Dreamer. My father said not to come into work until noon. I think he meant that he doesn’t want me to come at all. My stomach is still all fluttery.
    We go past Ernie’s trailer. The whirligigs are slowly ticking around in the early morning sunshine. The curtains are all closed and the air conditioning is rumbling.
    Marie comes out of the door.
    She’s got on a flowery pale button-down shirt and yellow shorts. She looks tired but neat, the kind of solidly shaped comforting type you see a lot in Florida. She has a watering can in her hand. She peers at me. “Aren’t you the one who found Ernie?”
    “I didn’t have anything to do with anything,” I say. “I just tripped over him. It was an accident.”
    She purses her lips and nods. “You just moved into Ted and Fritzie’s place, didn’t you?” she asks.
    “I think so,” I say. Ted and Fritzie?
    “They were homosexuals,” she tells me lowering her voice. She says the word “homosexuals” like it’s two words—both of which need to be handled carefully.
    “Oh,” I kind of whisper back. “I’m Lola Polenta,” I tell her, sticking out my hand.
    “I’m Marie,” she says switching the watering can to her left hand and shaking my hand limply. She doesn’t look like she’s been crying. Still, there’s strain around her mouth.
    “I don’t know what to do with myself. I just can’t believe this,” she says.
    “It is unbelievable,” I say.
    “It must have been some kid on drugs or something.”
    I’m glad she doesn’t say it must have been me. “Maybe Ernie had an enemy?” I ask her. Even I know that you’re supposed to ask that question when anybody gets murdered.
    “Enemy?” she asks.
    It does seem like a weird word.
    “He only moved in with me this past year.” Marie leans forward and tells me, “His wife kicked him out of their house in Ohio. She met another man in her yoga class. Ernie walked in one day on them and there they were stark naked on the living room couch. She kicked Ernie out. She was mad at HIM, can you imagine? She told him he invaded her privacy.”
    “That’s nervy.”
    “I had to take him in. He had nowhere else really to go.”
    She pinches a dead head off a purple flower. “He never talked about her. He kept everything to himself. Well, he was always that way. Secretive, you know?
    “And then, he was out so much of the time, working. And at the bar. He had a group of people he hung around with there. Coconuts, it’s called.” She pauses. “Maybe one of them didn’t like him.”
    “Enough to kill him?”
    “He got so angry recently,” she muses.
    “He changed?”
    “He pushed at people too hard.”
    “He did seem a little pushy,” I say.
    She peers at me. “Someone told me you had an argument with him.”
    “Yeah, but…”
    “I wish I knew what happened.” She glances toward the maintenance shed. “The police seem to have no idea,” she says looking at me.
    “Give your business card to everyone,” the Private Investigator Training Institute advised. “Everyone has something they secretly want to know more about. You’ll be surprised at the business that comes your way….”
    I reach into my pocket, and hand her my bright yellow business card that I had made up at Staples the day I signed up for the course. It was a fit of optimism. It says:
    ANSWERS
    LOLA POLENTA , PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR
    QUESTIONS RESOLVED… CURIOSITY SATISFIED…
    There’s a picture of Curious George in the corner next to my cell phone number.
    “Answers?” Marie says.
    I thought it was a great name for a business. It’s such a seductive word. “Who doesn’t want answers?” I say.
    “I never heard of a female private investigator before. Is this