So Like Sleep Read Online Free PDF

on it. I stopped smiling and repressed a shudder.
    Have you heard from Nancy?
    “No. I thought about calling her, but …”
    You’re probably right not to push it.
    “I know.”
    She needs time, John.
    “I know that, too.”
    There was nothing more to say on that subject. The sky was overcast, the air still. No sailboats in our part of the harbor. Two Boston Whalers raced on a near-collision course, both heading toward an anchored third, already bucking, its fishing rods bending.
    “New case, Beth. Son of a friend of the police lieutenant who covered for me last time. They say the son shot his girlfriend.”
    Who says?
    “That’s the problem. Everybody. The son included.”
    What do you say?
    “I don’t know. He isn’t helping me very much.”
    How old is he?
    “Only twenty, but a smart kid. Goreham College.”
    Is that where he met the girlfriend?
    “I think so.”
    Why would a rich Goreham boy want to kill a rich girl?
    “Well, to start with, he’s not rich. He’s a black, scholarship student. Her family, a white family, seems pretty well off, though.”
    Did he love her?
    “He didn’t say.” I thought for a minute. “No question that he caught a lot of flak from his neighborhood kids—black kids—about her, and he seems pretty intense, so yeah, I’d say he must have loved her to put up with it.”
    You said he wasn’t helping you much.
    “That’s right.”
    If you had lost me when you were twenty, and everybody said you were at fault, would you be much help to you?
    I swallowed. “I lost you when I was a lot older than twenty, and I knew the cancer wasn’t my fault, and I still wasn’t much help to anybody.”
    Beth waited a moment. See?
    I saw. “Her name was Jennifer Creasey,” I said.
    I’ll watch for her.

Six
    W HEN YOU NEED information, talk to someone who gathers it for a living. The Boston Herald ’s newsroom was noisy, in a muted sort of way. The screaming of editors and clattering of standard typewriters had yielded to the squawking of intercoms and the burping of computer terminals. I preferred the old atmosphere myself, and I know Mo Katzen did too.
    He was in his office, as always, in the ill-fitting vest and trousers of a three-piece suit, as always.
    “Mo, how can you be a reporter, yet never be out on a story?”
    “Hah, tell me about it,” he said, teeth clamped on a comatose cigar. He gestured toward the aged Remington that he still insisted on using. “You know what I’m writing about?”
    “No, Mo. I—”
    “A desk.” The top of his own desk looked like the step-off point of a ticker-tape parade. He took the cigar from his mouth. “A fifty-year-old desk that Mayor Curley supposedly had—there’s no supposed about it; I saw him perched on it often enough with these.” He pointed the index and middle fingers of his free hand at his eyes. “But no, the lawyers say we got to say ‘supposedly.’ Anyway, I’m writing about this desk that Curley supposedly had, that through the regimes Mayor White supposedly received, and that Mayor Flynn now wants to sit behind—no supposing there. Flynn really wants the desk. And guess what?”
    “Nobody can find it?”
    “On the button, John,” he said, inhaling as he futilely tried to get a throwaway lighter to fire his stogie. “Nobody can find a carved wood desk that’s got maybe thirty pounds on the Andrea Doria .”
    “Mo, I—”
    “Goddamn thing,” said Mo, pitching the lighter toward his wastebasket but missing. “You’re supposed to write with their pens, and shave with their razors, and you can’t get their goddamned lighters to spark enough to fry a moth.”
    “Mo—”
    “Getting back to the desk, though. There’s got to be five hundred—no, call it five thousand desks in City Hall. Every brother-in-law who’s on the payroll eventually gets a promotion into some created slot to free up his spot for the next brother-in-law. And if you promote the guy, you’ve gotta give him a desk,