The Hours of the Virgin Read Online Free PDF

empty Styrofoam cups slid and capered along the pavement, rattling like loose teeth. The Detroit Public Library, my voting address when I wasn’t eating stale cheese sandwiches behind the wheel waiting for a door to open or a car to pull out of a lot, looked as bleak and uninspired as the spray-painted obscenity drizzling down the stone steps in front. I read it aloud and with feeling.
    I know you like the old movies, kid , Dale Leopold had said the day I joined the agency, doubling its size. Go ahead and watch, but don’t buy into ’em. They’re not liars, just selective. For every hour you spend pumping hard-asses down by the docks for leads, you’ll spend a week polishing a chair with your pants in the library or schmoozing with some gassy records clerk in the basement of the City-County Building; some mook you wouldn’t stop to throw a rope to if he was drowning in the Rouge. It ain’t so bad. You might even get to like it. That’s when you’ll know your edge is gone. You forget you’re still doing cop work, and that eye in the back of your head heals over. Then you might as well throw yourself down a stairwell, because you’re through .
    Good advice, and he proved just how good it was when he forgot it himself. Routine tail job: track the bored-to-the-balls-of-his-feet middle executive through the extramarital jungle, note where he stops and for how long, and report back to his wife, a slam-dunk. The infidelity was the only colored thread in the monochromatic skein of Earl North’s life. The scenario, chiseled in granite by Piltdown Woman’s divorce attorney and never revised, called for the wandering spouse to come across with a fat settlement when confronted with the evidence of his unimaginative little affair. North, a gray supernumerary chiefly engaged in taking up space for thirty years or so in a rabbit-warren of corporate cubicles—not counting two weeks each August in a time-share condo on Lake Michigan—was no challenge for any investigator with half Dale’s experience. He only took the job to cover a quarterly tax payment. The best he had to look forward to in the way of entertainment was an attempt to buy him off, and even that was way out of character for this particular pigeon.
    That the pigeon would suddenly turn into a cornered rat, swing around with a gun in his hand, and pump three bullets into his shadow was a scene from another movie slipped in between reels. Dale had once claimed that nothing had surprised him since the day his mother parked him at the Michigan Central station and stepped off the center span of the Ambassador Bridge, but he’d have been the first to laugh at the look on his face when a sleepy attendant pulled out his drawer for me at the Wayne County Morgue. He was fifty-one.
    The funeral was as bland and respectable as a covered dish. He’d have preferred the tragic poetry of Willie Loman’s, but he’d made too many connections in twenty-five years at the same stand. In addition to his estranged wife and grown daughter, the procession had included friends from the police department and the county prosecutor’s office, from which he’d been bounced as an investigator when the city administration changed color along with most of the area bureaucracies; the sheriff’s chief of detectives, who had partnered him on the old Detroit racket squad; and a couple of Jackson prison alumni whose kids had clothes because Dale had pretended the information they gave him was worth an occasional twenty, although he’d have broken your nose if you called him on it. There was a number of old girlfriends as well, tough-faced redheads with nicotine stains between their fingers, who bawled all through the eulogy, delivered by a former Detroit police chaplain, who closed with a reading of the epigraph from John O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra .
    Instructions for the disposal of the remains, written in