The Devil and the Detective Read Online Free PDF

bigger on the inside than it did from the outside – much bigger, in fact. I followed her into the kitchen where she was drinking a cup of steaming tea. She offered me one and I accepted. She asked me if I take sugar or milk or lemon and I said lemon would be good, for there was a lemon out on a cutting board. We drank tea in silence and that was fine by me. For a minute, I even started to read the newspaper sitting on the kitchen table. A developer wanted to build on an ancient Cree burial site. Elaine started to speak and told me about phone calls she’d been receiving; when she picked up, the person on the other end wouldn’t say anything, simply waited, waited for her to get frustrated and hang up, but she said she wouldn’t hang up, that she’d give the person on the other end a piece of her mind , telling them that they’re sick fucks to fuck with a woman whose husband’s just been murdered, bloodily murdered with a knife to the chest, and that if they weren’t such goddamn cowards they’d speak up, say their piece, then leave her alone. I asked her how many of these phone calls she’d received and she said seven. Seven over the past eight hours. I asked her if she’d told the police and she said, ‘Fuck the police.’ We sat sipping from steaming mugs of tea and I thought about the phone calls and the murder and wondered if they were related: it sounds counterintuitive, but she was a beautiful woman, I thought, one who might perhaps attract these kinds of callers. I asked her if she’d ever received calls like that in past and she said yes but not so many in one day, in the past they were spread out, spread out over days, weeks, months, she said. I asked her if the calls started after she married Gerald. And she told me she’d been getting the calls since moving into the house I was standing in, the house Gerald was recently murdered in, and then I asked if I could see where she found the body.
    The living room was smaller than I’d expected, which was strange, since the house’s interior I’d imagined to be much smaller from the outside but in general was much larger save the living room. The room was impeccably decorated, however, with a small elegant vase on a small side table and a painting on the northeast wall, a painting almost solidly dark, though there looked like there might be a town and a jetty, perhaps, seen from the water, from the estuary, on a dark and foggy night, though I wasn’t sure what it was supposed to be. The couch had been removed. Its impression remained in the carpet. There was a coffee table, with no couch. There was the side table, too. Nothing was on either table – save the vase on the side table – but that was because the police took everything, Elaine said, and I asked her what’d been on the table and she said an ashtray and some magazines and books and so on. ‘I don’t know specifically,’ she said. There was a large window looking out onto their backyard, though it didn’t appear to have been tampered with. Elaine said that it was shut, too, last night, the night of Gerald’s murder. I stared out the window, onto the Andrewses’ well-maintained backyard, thinking about the case and, more specifically, thinking about Elaine, who stood beside me, looking out the window, and I caught her looking at my reflection in the window when I looked up and at hers. She looked back out onto the yard. The sun was setting and the bushes and lawn looked dark and green in the setting sun. I yawned, unintentionally, and registered hunger. I hadn’t eaten in a long time. Possibly days, I thought. The remaining leaves on the trees flapped in the wind but through the thick window we couldn’t hear either the flapping of the leaves or the howling of the wind, if in fact the wind was howling, which it probably wasn’t, for the leaves flapped gently, from the looks of it, from the