The Alternative Detective (Hob Draconian) Read Online Free PDF Page A

particular,” Sheldon said. He paused, then blurted, “She just wanted to give us a little time together.”
    I stared at him. “What on earth do you and I need any time together for?”
    “To try to work things out,” Sheldon said.
    “Oh, no, Sheldon,” I said. “Not now. Not things. I’m tired. I’ve got a client. The initial interview took a lot out of me.”
    “A good-paying client?” Sheldon asked, momentarily brightening.
    “No. Just a normal deadbeat client like the usual kind I get.”
    Sheldon stood up, walked up and down the room pounding his right fist into the palm of his left hand. I believe he was portraying frustrated anger. Or maybe angry frustration. In any case, he turned to me after a moment and said, “Damn it, Hob, this can’t go on.”
    “My sentiments exactly. Does that mean you’re going away?” Sheldon lives with us due to a concatenation of circumstances too ridiculous to be chronicled, and tangential, in any event, to my story. But I see that now, having mentioned them at all, I must explain.
    I met Sheldon five years ago, when the I.R.S. (on whose name be peace) audited me. After an exchange of paperwork, they sent Sheldon from the Newark office to look over my records. After spending a few hours going through the sackful of paper I dumped in his lap, some of them on the sort of extremely flimsy paper that Ibicenco shopkeepers used in the days when I lived in Ibiza and accumulated these pieces of paper, he looked up in annoyance. “Mr. Draconian” —we were still quite formal at that stage— “don’t you have any better records than these?”
    “I’m not so good about pieces of paper,” I told him. “I try to keep them all: I know that Uncle Sammy wants me to. But they get lost; you know what I mean, man? But you might ask my wife, Mylar; she may have some old cash ledgers; I believe she’s sentimental about things like that.”
    And then, pat upon the moment, Mylar entered. Five feet nine, slender, pointy-breasted, svelte-legged Mylar of the radiant smile and china-blue eyes. Sheldon saw (as he told me afterwards) the fulfillment of his most impossible boyhood dreams when he beheld this beautiful, outrageous lady in skintight jeans, sequined blouse, snakeskin boots, cowboy hat, clunky jewelry, crazy makeup, with purple streak in her hair. It was love at first sight, he confessed to me months later over too many beers in McGinty’s on Grit Street down near Macadam. For him she represented the impossible dream.
    To be honest about it, Sheldon’s sudden interest in my wife was not entirely unwelcome; I had been wondering how to get rid of Mylar. Not that there was anything wrong with her. She was just crazy in her way and I was crazy in mine, and we had drifted so far apart that only the cosmic interrelatedness of everything gave us anything at all in common. And here was this nice fellow with high moral standards and a steady job, who was going to take her off my hands so that I could jettison my other responsibilities as well, sell the house and go live my impossible dream, namely, to return to Europe and find the magic again. They say you can never do it twice; once is all you get, and if you don’t like once try none, the other option; but I can dream, can’t I?
    There was a difficulty, however. I was Sheldon’s case and he’d staked his reputation and pride on this one, and the only thing that would satisfy his exquisitely well-honed sense of ethics was to bring my case to successful completion; that is, to collect Uncle Sammy’s due for the dinero I had somehow failed to fork over in previous years even less successful than this one. Only then would he feel the moral right, the certitude , I believe he called it, to allow him without guilt to take my wife.
    Well, shucks, I’m not a bad guy, and I’d just as soon have paid up to government. I just didn’t have the money, that’s all. There are the payments to Katie and the kids. There’s rent on my office.