Slow Burn Read Online Free PDF Page B

still open.”
    “It is. Barely.” That frown again. “Maybe you ought to get out more, Charlie.”
    “Maybe I should.”
    With that, she made her exit and drew every eye in the place doing it. She had the kind of walk that deserved to be watched, and she knew it. Bixby watched her too, but with a different kind of admiration. “I love that girl, Charlie. She does some very undignified things with some very dignified people.”
    I slid into her place in the booth and pushed her drink out of the way. It smelled like Scotch, or something like it. The seat was still warm from her body. Despite how hot it was in the place, I didn’t mind. I could still smell her scent: rose water and bath soap. “She still seeing Danny Stiles?”
    Bixby laughed. “No one’s seen Danny Stiles in weeks. He seems to have gotten himself into some trouble with Sally Balls again. Owes him a fair amount of money from what I understand. At least enough to send poor Danny into hiding.” He paused to watch Alice again as she walked out the front door. “Alice got herself some new playmates now that I’m much more interested in.”
    “You always did hang around with the best people, Wendell.”
    “True,” Bixby admitted. “Alice, and all the other Alices out there, keep my column stocked with juicy tidbits that keep readers interested and my publisher happy. Without people like her supplying information, I’d have to stop coming to beautiful places like this. Now, what’ll it be? Coffee or gin?”
    I’d worked up a hell of a thirst on the walk up there. I knew what I wanted, and I knew what I should have. I noticed the coffee cup in front of him, but I also knew Bixby liked to drink his gin out of coffee cups. It kept people guessing. I decided to let fate choose for me. “Whatever you’re having is fine.”
    Bixby motioned to the bartender, who brought over another cup and a pot of coffee. I smiled. The fates had spoken. “Now that it’s just us girls,” Bixby said as he poured us coffee, “how about telling me what brings you down here at this ungodly hour. Things down at the Missing Persons Bureau getting tedious?”
    “You’re slipping, Wendell. I’ve been out of the Bureau for over a month. They’ve got me working Homicide now. Graveyard shift.”
    Bixby winced. “Gory, perhaps, but I’m sure the dead are a better class of people than you were used to in Vice.” Then the reporter in him woke up. “Say, why aren’t you working Vice anymore, anyway? Why all the crummy assignments lately?”
    I drank my coffee. Answering that question could’ve taken the rest of the morning and most of the afternoon. I didn’t have that kind of time, so I kept it simple. “Bad case of guilt going around the department. Whole lot of amnesia, too.”
    “Oh, that’s just silly,” Bixby stabbed out his cigarette in the ashtray. “No one gives a damn about corruption anymore, Charlie. The plight of the working man is all people care about now. The legions of unemployed, rallying in the streets, rioting for justice against the greedy corporations. That and avenging poor Baby Lindbergh’s death, of course. Haven’t you heard? Or don’t your bosses read the papers?”
    Bixby was right. Every day, the newspapers were full of two kinds of stories: riots and marches by people out of work, and The Lindbergh Kidnapping. They’d chased all the corruption stories right off the front pages. And why not? Riots and marches made great headlines. And when the infant son of a bona fide American hero gets kidnapped from his mansion in the dead of night, it’s news. The story had everything: famous wealthy family, a missing baby, suspicious household staff, the works. Newspapers from coast to coast were filled with stories, theories and rumors about who took the kid and where he was being held. The public cared about nothing else from March — when the kid was snatched — until May, when a truck driver taking a leak on the side of the road found