The Dirty Duck Read Online Free PDF Page A

had tickets in the stalls.
    â€œMan, I wouldn’t miss it. There’s all sorts of evidence . . . it’s a revenge tragedy, you know.”
    â€œReally?”
    â€œThey’re all the same. Now Kyd—Tom Kyd, I mean—was a good friend of Marlowe’s; but all I can say is, with friends like that—who needs enemies?” Schoenberg waved him back. “Come on, sit down a minute, I want to show you something.”
    With a sort of dreadful fascination, as if he had been hypnotized by the snake’s eye of the computer. Melrose sat down again.
    Harvey punched the keys around, saying, “Can you feature it? Kyd saying all this stuff against Marlowe?”
    â€œ. . . amongst those waste and idle papers (which I carde not for) & which vnaskt I did deliuer up, were founde some fragmentes of a disputation toching that opinion affirmed by Marlowe to be his, and shufled with some of myne (unknown to me) by some occasion of our wrythinge in one chamber twoe yeares synce. . . . That I shold loue or be familer frend, with one so irreligious, were verie rare . . . he was intemperate & of a cruel hart . . . an athiest . . .”
    â€œOf course, we have to remember Kyd was being tortured into giving evidence against Marlowe—”
    Melrose, quite familiar by now with torture, rose. “It’s been most enlightening, Mr. Schoenberg.”
    â€œHarve. Kyd wrote The Spanish Tragedy—”
    â€œI know,” said Melrose icily.
    Harvey Schoenberg sighed. “Like I said, read one, you’ve read ’em all. Those revenge tragedies are all alike.”
    Melrose had to argue, despite himself. “I would certainly not class Hamlet in the general category of revenge—”
    He was not to be permitted to complete his thought, apparently.
    â€œWhy? Same old stuff. Trouble is, Hamlet wanted revenge on Claudius and went around killing all the wrong people before he finally got around to the right one.”
    Melrose had to admit it was a refreshingly simple way to look at Hamlet.

4
    D etective Superintendent Richard Jury was not kidding himself.
    He knew that stopping here to visit his old friend Sam Lasko had merely been an excuse to spend a few days in Stratford, so that he could appear, as if by some strange coincidence, on Jenny Kennington’s doorstep.
    He sat with his feet up on Detective Sergeant Lasko’s cluttered desk, scanning the Stratford telephone directory. He was trying to look awfully casual about the search for the number; he was certain the lady in the corner—Lasko’s secretary—had eyes like lasers beneath those heavy brows and hornrimmed glasses with which she could burn straight through the telephone book to the page of K ’s he was scouring, and then smile meanly and go tell the world. Jury tried to empty his mind. Probably, she was a mind-reader too.
    He found the entry Kennington, J., and picked up a pencil and wrote it into his notebook. And then, telling himself he was really only looking for the best route to London, he got up and looked at the blow-up of a map of Stratford. She lived in the old part of Stratford—
    â€œCan I help you find something, Superintendent?”
    The voice hit him between the shoulder blades. Quickly, he turned. Was she laughing, secretly? “What? No. No, I was just looking up the route to London.”
    â€œWhat’s the matter,” she asked, “with the one you came on?” She zapped her page from the typewriter, and smiled her psychic’s smile.
    He started to mumble something about construction and road workers but decided she would find out later that he was lying, so he said nothing. But she was rolling another sheet into the typewriter, as if the question had been an idle one anyway.
    Sap, he thought, not of her but of himself. Jury leaned back in Lasko’s chair, and wondered what it was in his nature that kept him