The Sleeping and the Dead Read Online Free PDF Page B

three.”
    â€œI didn’t know you worked that case.” He lifted the first photo and reverently set it aside, revealing the same gruesome scene shot from a slightly different angle. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
    â€œThey’re still open investigations. If the department found out I showed these to anyone, much less sold prints…” I inhaled a lung full of Michi’s Winston. My grandfather had smoked Winstons. He drank so much coffee and smoked so many cigarettes that his dentures would turn their soak water brown as tea. I had a cousin who said you could catch a buzz drinking it.
    It wasn’t easy letting these pictures go. As much I hated anything to do with the Playhouse Killer, I hated the idea of profitting by his work even more. I walked to the fridge, opened the massive stainless-steel door, stood in front of the cavernous shelves with the cold flowing out around my naked feet like a ghost. “You got any beer?”
    â€œIn the door.” He lifted the third grisly photograph and tilted it into the light. I found a Heineken and twisted off the cap. “Do you have more of these?” he asked.
    I swallowed and shook my head no at first, then shrugged. “I have pictures from all the murders.”
    Michi set the photos down and turned in his chair to look at me. “God dammit, you’re no different than any of my other little sycophants. You profit by my eccentricities, yet you withhold your best from me. You know I’ll buy every picture you bring me, yet you keep these…” He turned and reverently touched the four photographs with his outspread fingers. “… masterpieces of the genre to yourself.”
    I had been supporting myself over the last four years by selling accident and suicide photos to Michi, catering to his death fetish, but selling these photos was a new low for me.
    â€œI’m taking a huge risk even coming here,” I said, suppressing a belch.
    â€œAnd I pay you well for your risk.” He thumped his cane on the floor. “You know I love you, Jacqueline, but why don’t you do something positive with your life, instead of sticking every dollar you earn into your arm?”
    â€œI’m not a user,” I said.
    â€œReally?” Michi exclaimed. “Yesterday I bought three thousand dollars’ worth of pictures from you, yet here you come back today in the pouring down rain to sell me some more. What did you do with it all?”
    â€œYou sound like my mother.”
    The young black man who’d let me into the house entered the kitchen, suddenly and unannounced. He was dressed in a loud yellow sports coat and check slacks. He opened the fridge and fished out a bottle of Evian.
    â€œWhere are you off to?” Michi asked him.
    â€œOut,” he said as he glanced at his watch.
    â€œWith who?”
    â€œWhom with?” The young man twitched a moist lock of hair from his eye. “If I told you, you’d only have a stroke, Michi-san.” He opened the bottle, took a swig, winked at me and left. His was a friendly secret smile, shared between us parasites. It was scary to think that somebody can be that close to death and not know it, not sense it somehow.
    Michi frowned after the boy. “I’m getting old. I can’t recall his name. Chris something, I think. So many boys come through my house these days, I don’t even meet half of them. But I don’t complain because they would just go somewhere else.”
    â€œI’m buying the Leica,” I said. The boy was already gone from my mind. I passed the strap over my head and let the camera’s weight rest between my breasts. “This is one of the finest cameras in the world, used by the best photographers, professionals like William Eggleston and Huger Foote. I already paid three thousand for it, but I need another five hundred. A new Leica would cost twice that.”
    Michi laid his cigarette on the