The Crime Studio Read Online Free PDF

And the guy down the hall once addressed him as ‘Sunbeam’. Where was the life in this slobbery? The existence of a brain in the entire building was a matter for savage speculation. Eddie plotted action in his barnacle-encrusted room - something had to change.
    But it wasn’t so easy. Eddie tried to provoke mass arrests by anonymously calling Chief of the Cops Henry Blince about the dozens of insane barbers in the building but Blince came round to have a shave and left stroking his face. Eddie tried to evacuate the building by yelling fire but at this everyone burst into the corridors with cameras and peels of celebratory laughter. He bought a bomb from Brute Parker’s all-night gun shop but the blast only succeeded in straightening out the north wall. He released a sackful of energetic adders but later discovered that they were being snared and roasted by the penniless residents. One guy gave Eddie the recipe for a sauce. Eddie saw another tenant stroll through the lobby gnawing at a toffee-covered snake-head on a stick.
    For all the respect Eddie was given in this place, he may as well have been wearing antlers.
    It was a habit among the inhabitants of Eddie’s building to shoot at the communal rat for therapy and sport, but Eddie just pleaded with it to breed like a rabbit and drive the other tenants away - the rodent would stop and look at him with a mixture of profoundest pity and lofty disdain. One dismal night Eddie taped a pack of plastic explosive to the back of the glossy vermin and sent it out - he figured someone would strike the expanded target and blow themselves to hell. The rat shuffled off the plastic, swallowed it and skittered right back for more - Eddie was frantically aware that he couldn’t have an unstable rat in his pad and chased it all the way out to the Loop Expressway, shooting the bastard with a Norinco AK-47 submachine gun. The rodent crouched on the road and exploded like a gas truck. People ten miles away saw the flare.
    After that, things got worse. Eddie was a gaunt, Perkinsesque obsessive. He swore he heard rats in the walls. Maybe the communal had taken his advice and bred - maybe the whole family was ballistic. And every week Ivo came snaffling up and waved a bit of phlegm-soaked paper at him, covered in scrawl. Didn’t Ivo understand this was the tenement where god had died? That its destruction was a service to life-loving men and women everywhere? And if the occupants got a little cod-eyed in the crossfire, Eddie could take the heat.
    Saturday night, Eddie told Ivo to piston over to the Muse Street movie house and pantomime someone with a life. Then he went down to Ivo’s basement and chuckled as he stooped to adjust the coal-gas furnace. Like the rest of the building the furnace had been constructed when people were thirty percent smaller. Eddie easily bust the main feed and jammed it into a hole high up in the hollow wall. The rats would be the first to go. He’d sit tight an hour and a half for the gas to rise as far as the middle floor, then pick up Ivo’s phone and call the rooms up there until somebody switched on a light, igniting the gas and blowing the roof off the building. But the sap had miscalculated - coal gas doesn’t rise, it falls. Within an hour, Eddie Slam was dead.
    Several froth-lipped residents of the apartment building attended the funeral and Ivo Beak read Woyzeck over the grave, into which two of the frenetically convulsing mourners fell. Ivo’s first novel was published a year later and he was hailed as a brave postmodernist voice. He dedicated the book to Eddie Slam, ‘patron and benefactor’. Five years later he bought the apartment building, evicted everyone, and bombed it to a shadow. ‘Ask not what your country can do to you,’ he whispered, ‘ask what you can do to your country.’

INTERLUDE
    The Delayed Reaction Bar on Valentine Street was a popular den with the moody and furious. Don Toto the owner and barman specialised in