Seven Kinds of Death Read Online Free PDF

upstairs.

THREE
    Later, Charlie would be able to pinpoint the exact moment when he wandered innocently into the trap, and then the exact moment when it was sprung, but that morning in early June he had no intimation of hazardous moments ahead. Things had been peachy, he thought later, recapitulating that morning. He had done a little job for Phil Stern that had put a little money in the bank, and, more, had been entertaining in its own way, culminating in a little joust with a very good arsonist who had had very bad luck and cursed his date of birth for it. Good clean fun. The guy probably would beat the rap in court, but that wasn’t Charlie’s problem. And the car had not needed the overhaul he had been dreading. The sun was shining, the weather strange, but rather nice. The whole world had had strange weather that spring, but few places had it as nice as upper New York in early June.
    He and Constance had corralled the cats inside and she had taken them out to the patio one by one to dose them with ear drops. Ashcan had ear mites, but you don’t treat only one cat. Brutus had to be first always; he had an elephantine memory, and the sniff of medicine was enough alert him that it was hiding time. Charlie admired Constance’s ability to snag a cat, hold it in a grip that made the cat look as if rigor mortis was well advanced, and then do whatever was needed. Afterward, Brutus streaked off shaking his head, flinging medicine to the wind in both directions; he would not return until supper, and by then it would be time for another treatment. Candy complained in her scratchy voice when it was her turn, and Ashcan, who was the bearer of evil tidings this time, tried to crawl under the doormat.
    Then Charlie had gone out for the mail. Constance was drying her hands when he returned and sorted it at the kitchen table. Very little, very dull looking. He was browsing through a catalogue with high-tech fishing gear that featured things like a computerized casting outfit that you attached to a box that told you what was biting, what bait to use, how to use it. Maybe if your Aunt Ethel was coming for a visit, he was thinking, grinning, when the trap opened.
    “For goodness sake,” Constance murmured. “Do you want to go to a send-off party for a gallery tour that Marion Olsen is having?”
    “Nope,” he said, and turned a page. At the time he did not hear a clash of metal, did not hear the door bang, but later he knew that was the moment. That Nope was the magic word. Without looking up, he asked, “Who’s Marion What’s-it?”
    “Oh, Charlie,” Constance said in that particular tone of voice that held such a mixture of exasperation and patience that it was hard to tell which was uppermost. “You remember her. We went to some of her shows. I grew up with her. We saw her all the time in New York when we were all just out of school, before she moved down near Washington. We exchange notes and Christmas cards every single year.” She sounded like a saintly teacher struggling with an overgrown student who couldn’t quite grasp Dick and Jane.
    “Oh,” he said. “You mean Tootles.”
    “I mean Marion Olsen,” she said coldly. “She’s finally surfacing again as a sculptor, after all these years. A fifteen-gallery touring show. Good for her. I’m so glad.”
    “She did that thing she called the Seven Kinds of Death , right?”
    “You know very well she did.”
    “And she asked you if you really had married a fireman, and then she said, ‘A terrible waste.’ “
    “Charlie, I’ve told you a dozen times, she didn’t say that. You misheard her.”
    “Maybe,” he admitted. “It could have been “What terrible taste.’ And everyone at that last party was a kook of one kind or another, including sister Babar.”
    Constance’s look this time was withering. “Her sister’s name is Beatrice. When she was a very small child they called her Ba Ba.”
    “She was never a very small child,” he said. “And