The Monkey's Raincoat Read Online Free PDF

thrown open. The back was off the television. A palm had been worked out of its heavy brass pot, scattering dirt over the beige carpet. The Zenith console stereo was turned on its face and about two hundred record albums spilled out on the floor. One of those large ceramic greyhounds you see in department stores was cracked open on the hearth, its head intact but lying on the carpet upside down. It looked asleep.
    Some mistake.
    â€œHow long ago did you call?” I said to Ellen Lang.
    Janet Simon answered. “About forty-five minutes. She told them it wasn’t an emergency.”
    â€œIf you had they’d have been here forty minutes ago. As it is, they’ve called it out to a radio car. They’ll be here any time.”
    Ellen Lang crossed her arms in the keep-me-warm posture and began nibbling the side of her mouth. Every light in the house was on, as if Janet or Ellen had gone through, making a point of driving out as much darkness as possible. There was a little night-light behind a wingback chair beside the fireplace. Even it glowed.
    â€œHe leave a note?” I said.
    She shook her head.
    â€œTake any clothes for the boy?”
    Shook her head again.
    â€œTake anything else?”
    She squinted and did something funny with her mouth, blowing air out the corners while keeping the lips together. “I checked my things. I checked the silver. The Neil Diamond records are still here. Mort loves Neil Diamond.”
    â€œThis is A-plus help you’re giving me, Mrs. Lang.”
    She looked at me like I was fading out and tough to see. “Mort isn’t a thief. If he took anything of his, that isn’t thievery, is it? He paid for it, didn’t he? He paid for all this and that gives him some rights, doesn’t it?” She said that to Janet Simon.
    Janet Simon reached a cigarette out of a little blue purse, tamped it, fired up, and pulled enough smoke into her chest to fill the Goodyear blimp. “When are you going to wake up?” she said.
    I left them to it and went down the hall. There was a door on the left, closed, with the sounds of running water. “That’s the bathroom,” Janet Simon called. “The girls are in there.” The girls’ bedroom was just past the bath but on the right. It was pink and white and had twin canopy beds and probably used to be quite nice. Now, the mattresses were half on and half off and one of the box springs had been turned upside down. There was a dresser and a chest, but all the drawers were out and the clothes were scattered on the floor. Bruce Springsteen was on the closet door, which spoke highly for at least one of the girls. Clothes hung neatly on the crossbar even though the closet floor had been trashed. Just outside the closet, there were two three-ring binders and two stacks of schoolbooks. The binders and the dust covers on the books were covered with doodles and designs and words.
Cindy loves Frank. B.T. + C.L. Robby Robby Robby, I want you for my hobby
.
BOOK YOU
. I found a folded piece of three-hole paper in Cindy Lang’s geography book with a message written on it in pencil. The message was ELAM FREID BITES THE BIG ONE!!!!! I wondered if Elam Freid knew that. I wondered how much he’d pay to find out.
    I went to the boy’s room next. It was smaller than the girls’, with a single bed and a dresser and a big oak chest. The chest was turned over and the dresser was on its side and the mattress and box springs leaned drunkenly against the wall. I had wanted to go over the boy’s room. I had wanted to read his diary and sift through his comics and peek under his mattress. I had wanted to go through the wads of paper in his trash and page through his notebooks and study the drawings that he made and pinned to the wall. A week before they left, maybe Mort had said something to the boy and the boy had left a clue. All of that was gone. There was only a big mess here that made me hope the boy