The Royal Wulff Murders Read Online Free PDF Page B

began.
    “I’m ‘ought not’ going to say a single word,” Doris said.

CHAPTER FIVE
Awakening
    S tanding on the inn’s veranda, Stranahan looked toward the peaks in the Gallatin range, midnight blue under a silver moon. He had noticed a flyer advertising Miss Velvet Lafayette, Queen of Hearts—A Riverboat Song Stylist and Jazz Pianist from the Mississippi Delta, taped to the door on his way out. The picture showed a younger version of the singer standing in front of the paddle wheel of a gambling boat, holding a playing card—the queen of hearts—over her breast. He must have seen the flyer earlier. Thay was why she had seemed familiar when he had passed her on the street.
    He could not deny the attraction he felt toward her, even if he told himself he was just a sucker for a Southern accent. Or maybe Doris had it right. Certainly he had been lonely enough the past few weeks. But there was an undercurrent of tension that had passed between them, the spark that had been missing from his marriage almost from its beginning.
    Sean took a drink from his bottle of beer and sat down on a wrought-iron bench. He wasn’t thinking now of Velvet Lafayette, or of Beth, but of a woman he had met in Boston a year after he left his grandfather’s law firm. The woman, Katherine O’Reilly, had hired him to find evidence of her husband’s affair, which he had accomplished by the simple expedient of waiting outside the man’s office building, identifying him by a photograph, and then following him to the Park Plaza Hotel near the Public Garden. He had watched the man punch theelevator button for the sixth floor, evidently having arranged a room earlier. Sean waited until he was out of sight and followed suit. Stepping out of the iron cage into the long hall, he hung around, looking purposefully at nothing, until a woman with sharp facial features and hair that matched the color of her camel hair coat stepped out of the elevator, knocked on the door of room 605, and was let in. He caught only a snatch of conversation, but the name “John” registered as the door shut. Stranahan caught the elevator down and phoned Mrs. O’Reilly from the lobby; she said she’d be there in fifteen minutes.
    “I’m not going to cry,” she said when she met him on the hotel steps, although her hands trembled as she rummaged distractedly through her purse. Katherine O’Reilly was a handsome brunette in her midforties whose hazel eyes were a little too bright, betraying the emotion that her voice tried to cover up. She asked Stranahan for something to write on. He produced an envelope. After some more rummaging, she took a magenta lipstick from her purse and scrawled two words: IT’S OVER, K.
    “That isn’t too dramatic, is it,” she said to Stranahan, but it had not been a question, and she held up a hand when he attempted to follow her into the elevator. A few minutes later she was back down.
    “I didn’t make a scene. I stuck it in the door,” she said. She looked directly at Stranahan. “The Copley Square is right around the corner. I’m going to get a drink at the bar. Are you coming?”
    He went with her out into a light winter rain and, after the Scotch—drunk in dead silence—stood awkwardly beside her in the elevator of Boston’s oldest hotel. She looked at him intently, as if scrutinizing his face for sincerity. In the room, she stopped his hand when he reached for the light switch.
    “No lights.” She kissed the rain off his face. And what started then as an act of retribution softened into a genuine regard and tenderness that seemed apart from the crisis that had led to the hotel and surprised them both.
    “I want you to know,” she told him sometime that night, “that this wasn’t an eye for an eye. I’m not leaving him because he had an affair… again.” She laughed sadly to herself. “Men are men. No, I’m leaving because there’s nothing to say. We slide by each other like ghosts. Why is it we always fall in