The Dirt Peddler Read Online Free PDF

them.”
    “How do you know they’re ‘love letters’ if you never open them?”
    “I suggest you use your rubber hose on someone else, Mr. Hardesty. Larry Fletcher would be a good choice. Do you want the job or not?”
    I knew that if I didn’t take it, he would manage to find someone to go after Larry Fletcher and, guilty or not, he didn’t deserve to be hounded by some ham-fisted straight P.I. with a Mickey Spillane complex. So while it was still against my better judgment, I found myself saying, “Okay, I’ll take the case. I’ll bring the contract, including a revision of my rate schedule, to your office—or…” I thought the mention of his office would spark a response and it did, because he broke in immediately.
    “We don’t need a contract. I just want you to put the fear of God into that little turd.”
    “Well, I’m sorry, but I don’t take any case without having a signed contract to protect both parties’ interest.”
    He gave an exasperated sigh. “Very well, then. But just mail it to my post office box. I don’t want anyone to know of our arrangement, and the post office box is more private. I’ll sign it and get it back to you.”
    “Fine.” I wondered idly why, if he didn’t want to be seen hobnobbing with faggots, we were sitting in the front window of a popular restaurant within two doors of a bookstore promoting his book.
    Oblivious to my thoughts, he nodded. “You’ll go see him immediately, then? We only have until the fifteenth—that’s just two days after I get my next royalty check, and I have far better things to do with the money.”
    “The minute I get the signed contract and retainer,” I said as pleasantly as I could. I could see he wasn’t too happy about that, but I couldn’t care less. A big part of me was just looking for the slightest excuse to tell him to forget it.
    *
    On the walk back to my office—I’d insisted on paying for my own lunch, and he didn’t object—I tried to figure out just why in the hell I had agreed to take this case. I’ve turned down cases before. Okay, not many, but… Actually, I think it had something to do with his remark about his trusting that I wasn’t as much a bigot as he was.
    And I was just nosy enough to want to know exactly what Fletcher—if it was Fletcher— really had on the guy. A check made out to a rental agency might look a little incriminating, but I couldn’t really see it being much of a basis for blackmail. There was more going on here than Tunderew was letting on, and that he apparently thought I was too stupid to figure it out really pissed me off. But Fletcher or not, I suspected Tony T. Tunderew had quite a few skeletons rattling around in his…uh…closet. If it turned out Tunderew was gay, I might seriously consider turning in my membership card and joining a monastery. But I knew full well that being gay is not an automatic nomination for sainthood—straights don’t hold a patent on obnoxious jerks.
    As soon as I got in the door of the office, I filled out a contract, drew a line through my normal rates and wrote in the new figure above, and increased the amount of my retainer by the same percentage. I really sort of suspected…with no small element of hope in there…that I’d never hear from the guy again.
    I checked the business card Tunderew had given me (I now had two, so I pitched the one Glen O’Banyon had given me at Hughie’s) for the P.O. Box number he’d written on the back, addressed an envelope, and went out into the hall to drop it in the mail chute beside the elevators.
    When I returned to the office, I called Glen’s office and left word with Donna that I had met with Mr. Tunderew and would be taking the case.
    I determined to put Tunderew out of my head until and unless I got the contract back with a check. But me being me, my mind kept going back to my meeting with the guy, and especially to Larry Fletcher. I was very curious about him for some reason. It was obvious that