The Interrogation Read Online Free PDF Page B

inquiries in Harbortown, where Sheila Kanowski had lived her last days, and finally moving backward into the life that had preceded it.
    He discovered that in her youth Sheila Kanowski, known then as Lorna Dolphin, had partied with the uptown crowd, an extraordinarily pretty young hooker who’d been passed from one white-gloved hand to another until age and familiarity had stolen her allure. After that she’d worked as a fish packer in one of the local markets by day and haunted the dockside bars by night, a loud-mouthed sot often picked up by foot patrolmen, tossed in the nearest drunk tank, and left to dry out overnight.
    And so she might have lived out her days, then been found dead beneath the bridge or in some harbor shanty, one of hundreds like her.
    But at thirty-seven Sheila Kanowski took up prostitution once again, turning tricks in Harbortown, usually dockworkers or old sailors so bleary with drink, they hardly saw the body they pawed.
    On the night of her death, the cold-case file concluded, Sheila Kanowski had likely taken one of her customers to a garbage-strewn back alley, where the tryst had suddenly turned lethal, probably because Sheila had at some point during the proceedings opened her famously abusive mouth.
    But it was not that simple, as Burke uncovered, for Sheila Kanowski had done more than return to a life of prostitution. True, during her last days she’d plied hertrade in Harbortown. But in the weeks immediately preceding those days, she’d seemed seized by a deluded determination to recapture the beautiful young woman she’d once been. Sheila had returned to an old identity, as if by will alone she could revive the party girl who’d once been the toast of Broad Street, a compact pleasure palace much admired by the well-heeled middle-aged club men of fashionable Winchester Heights, men who’d used her for a time, then unceremoniously dropped her from their circle.
    And for fifteen years she had, in fact, disappeared from their lives. Then, abruptly, Sheila Kanowski had dyed her hair flaming red and bobbed it in the style of the days of her youth. She’d pulled her old clothes out too, let out the seams to their full measure, and slipped into them again. She’d become a grotesque, overweight flapper, complete with the long black cigarette holder that had once been the emblem of Lorna Dolphin.
    All of this could be dismissed as the theatrics of an old whore who’d lost her wits. But Burke discovered that during the two weeks before her death, Sheila Kanowski had been rather rudely escorted from places quite remote from the dockside bars and brothels where she’d lived for the past twenty years, places that had been all too well known to Lorna Dolphin.
    The conclusion was inescapable. Sheila Kanowski had invaded Lorna Dolphin’s world. Further inquiry revealed that on at least three occasions Sheila/Lorna had brazenly sidled up to a certain silver-haired man who’d clearly been astonished and appalled by the vulgar harridan who’d materialized before him.
    The man’s name was Donald Webster, a wealthy businessman who, at the time of Kanowski’s murder, had been contemplating a run for Lieutenant Governor, a run which, after the murder, he’d decided not tomake. He’d cited health reasons as the cause of his withdrawal from the race, but as far as Burke had been able to determine, Donald Webster had been in perfect health, played tennis every weekend at his club, took skiing trips to Switzerland, and often rode in polo matches held at his country estate.
    Burke probed further, and found that a good portion of the Webster family fortune was based on the manufacture of cutlery, and that in his youth, Donald Webster’s friends had called him Blade.
    Burke could still recall the look on the face of the young homicide detective to whom he’d laid out his discoveries.
    You’re talking about a very powerful man, Tom.
    Yes, I know.
    And not much evidence.
    All I’m asking is that you take