The Monet Murders Read Online Free PDF Page A

better than serving up blue plate specials, even though he would never do anything to improve her lot in life beyond a cheap bracelet or two. In her heart, she knew that as well as I did.
    And so when I came along with a counteroffer to come with me to California, she had no trouble making up her mind. This was just after her pathetic husband had gotten himself run over by a bus. Whether he meant to do it or not didn’t seem to matter in the long run. Myrtle was free to go, and freely she went, after selling the diner to an Italian who was connected and therefore understood the advantages of a legitimate business when it came time to launder money from other sources. I have to confess, if that’s the word, that I’d been involved in this particular deal. It had worked out well, because Myrtle didn’t want much beyond getting out, and the buyers knew a bargain when they saw it. I even got a commission. I knew more than a few of those boys, and they liked me. They liked me because the old guy who ran the town liked me. There’s no sense going into why; suffice it to say that he did, and that gave me a pass with all the local goombahs. Had they known what I was trying to do in partnership with the FBI, it would have been very different. But they didn’t. Not so far, anyway.
    There was a definite upside to the whole experience, though—I have to admit I enjoyed taking Myrtle away from the cartoon character Lily had married. It came close to evening the score. They say revenge is a dish best served cold, but I say it’s like good Scotch—hot or cold, it satisfies. Besides, I could tell myself I was doing Lily a last favor by whisking her husband’s girlfriend away so that he could then pay more attention to his wife. Maybe they could work out their little problems and settle into domestic contentment. Or, as they used to say, felicity. I could tell myself that, but I try never to lie—to myself. I didn’t want to think of Lily thirty years on, a little heavier and chairwoman of the country-club flower committee. But I knew that’s where she would be if I needed to find her. There was comfort, and its opposite, in that thought.
    I was only a little in love with Myrtle, and I think she felt the same way. You couldn’t really tell about her, because she had a natural reserve, a kind of protectiveness that she’d developed long before I met her. Part of it was the tentativeness that many immigrants feel when they come to this country, especially those coming from poor countries where tomorrow was not a sure thing for most folks. Part of it was the constant knowledge of being an alien, someone apart; I suppose that’s why she worked so hard on her accent.
    In any event, for whatever reason, there was always something Myrtle kept hidden, even from me. So even though she was a warm and passionate bed partner, there was no way of knowing whether it was just pure animal spirit or something deeper. The best I could figure was that our relationship wasn’t exactly a business arrangement, and it wasn’t exactly true romance: it was somewhere in between. Maybe we werejust friends. The French—who else?—have an expression for this: “amie amoreuse.” A friend/lover. That about summed it up, I guess. In any case, I’d wanted to help her, and introducing her to Ethel had been the fastest way to do that.
    You might think that Ethel would get jealous, and for a moment I worried about that too. But I should have known better. Ethel was only interested in the schtupping, to borrow Manny Stairs’s Yiddish dictionary. She liked me, but that was as far as it went. It wouldn’t have mattered to her if I’d been married and had a mistress to boot. She just wanted her afternoon diversions, and in exchange she was only too happy to help me or mine get along in the business. I admired her for that. It was unselfish of her. And that kind of unselfishness