The Gutter and the Grave Read Online Free PDF

grin on hubby’s face, and then the grin turning to ashes because Toni is in the arms of another man, Toni is in the arms of Dave Parker.
    I hit him with a .45.
    I had a license for the gun, of course, and I pulled it from the shoulder holster, and I went at him, and I kept hitting him because the son-of-a-bitch hadn’t only taken my wife of four months, he had taken a dream, and dreams are the one thing you should never steal from a man. And so I tried to reconstruct a demolished dream by destroying the demolisher, and all I did was destroy myself.
    The police were so kind, the bastards. They understood completely, but they took away my license and my gun and my pride.
    End of story. Add a Mexican divorce. Toni Cordell becomes Toni McAllister again. A little too old for the Princeton-Rutgers routine, a little less sleek, the younger competition springing up in the plush Manhattan bistros, but still with the challenge in her green eyes, still with the dazzling even smile and the narrow ankles and the educated hip-and-leg stalk of a leopard.
    End of story.
    Add a guy with a shattered dream and no profession and a trunkful of memories, painful, the climactic memory the worst of all, a guy who wished
he’d
have been beaten with a .45, truly destroyed, beaten to a pulp until there was nothing left but the memory of a man. Matt Cordell, memory. I drifted to the Bowery. There were a lot of people trying to forget there. And maybe Dave Parker’s face healed, but Matt Cordell carried scars that would never heal. Alcohol is good for scars; it’s an antiseptic.
    Now, five years later, I walked where I’d first met her. I was about to do a job again. I felt no pride, I felt no anticipation, I felt no excitement. All that went out of me the night I walked into that bedroom and found my wife Toni with another man’s hands twisted in her long blonde hair.

Chapter Three
    Christine Archese was a blonde.
    She opened the door a crack, looked out at me, and left the chain on. I’m not a wholesome sight to behold. Somewhere under the growth of my beard there is what Toni once called “an Irish boulder jaw,” but it is barely recognizable. My eyes are brown, but they bear the telltale red of the whiskey drinker. I pass for a man sometimes, but only because I once belonged to the human race.
    “What do you want?” she said. There was no fright in her voice. I saw level blue eyes in the crack of the door, those and the blonde hair.
    “Johnny Bridges sent me,” I said. “I’m a friend of his.”
    “What’s your name?”
    “Matt Cordell.”
    “I don’t know you.”
    “Open the door, Christine,” I said. “I’m harmless. And Johnny’s in trouble.”
    She hesitated a moment, and then took off the chain. Her eyes swept me quickly as I walked into the apartment. The apartment was furnished with nice Third Avenue department store furniture. It was spotlesslyclean. Christine Archese led me into the living room of the railroad flat and then offered me a chair. I sat. She was a tall girl with a magnificent bosom and good hips, a little thick in the waist and legs, a strong girl with strong hands and jaw, a mouth full and meaningful, eyes like the blue steel of an automatic.
    “What kind of trouble is Johnny in?” she asked.
    “Let me ask you something first.”
    “What do you want to ask me?”
    “Was Johnny here today?”
    “Yes.”
    “When?”
    “Two, two-thirty. I don’t remember exactly. Why?”
    “Did he say where he was going when he left?”
    “Yes. To look up a friend who’d been a private…” She stopped and sudden recognition crossed her face. “Did you say your name was Matt Cordell?”
    “Yes.”
    “Oh. Oh sure. Well, he…” She studied my face more closely. “Of course. I should have remembered. Your picture was all over the papers when it happened.” She nodded. “Still not over it, huh?”
    “Let’s drop it,” I said.
    “Sure. Did Johnny find you?”
    “He found me.”
    “Well, any friend