The Spellman Files Read Online Free PDF

Uncle Ray on his new diet and nonexercise regime. Uncle Ray said, “Clean living gave me cancer. I’m not going through that again.”

THE THREE PHASES OF MY QUASI-REDEMPTION (AND LOST WEEKEND #3)
    I was fifteen the first time Uncle Ray disappeared. He missed Friday night dinner, then Sunday morning football. His phone went unanswered for five days. My father dropped by Ray’s apartment and found a week’s worth of letters and flyers jutting out of the mailbox. He picked the locks to Ray’s apartment and discovered a sink full of moldy dishes, a refrigerator devoid of beer, and three messages on the answering machine. My dad used his more-than-ample tracking skills and located my uncle three days later at an illegal poker game in San Mateo.
    Six months after that Uncle Ray disappeared again.
    “I think Ray is having another Lost Weekend,” my mother said in muffled tones to my dad. This was the second time I had heard my mother refer to Ray’s disappearing acts by the title of the 1945 film, a cautionary tale starring Ray Milland. We’d watched the film in English class once. I can’t remember why. But I do recall thinking that 1945 debauchery didn’t hold a candle to modern-day depravity. That said, my mother’s reference stuck, and while I had no idea what truly went on during Uncle Ray’s first two Lost Weekends, by the third I was an expert. That brings me back to the list I mentioned earlier:
    Phase #1: Lost Weekend #3
    It was a weekend that lasted ten days. Not until the fourth day of Ray’s absence did we begin our search. The phone numbers, which my father amassed during the first two mysterious disappearances, were now typed, alphabetized, and filed neatly away in his desk drawer. Mom, Dad, David, and I quartered the list and began making inquiries. Several generations of contact numbers later, we learned that Uncle Ray was staying in room 385 of the Excalibur Resort and Casino in Las Vegas. Uncle Ray wasn’t like those dogs you hear about that get lost on a camping trip with their family and somehow manage to limp, starving and dehydrated, the three hundred or so miles back to their owners. Uncle Ray would be dehydrated all right, but he never seemed to find his way home.
    My father decided to invite me along “for the ride.” David wanted to go, but he was in the middle of filling out college applications at the time. Any notions of a fun father-daughter vacation were soon laid to rest. The invitation to accompany my dad was my parents’ version of an after-school special on the evils of drug and alcohol abuse.
    Dad banged on my door at 5:00 A.M . We were scheduled to be on the road at 6:00. I slept in until 5:45, when my father grew suspicious of my lack of noise and made some more of his own. This time, a deafening series of thumps followed by a guttural Get your lazy ass out of bed . I dressed and packed in fifteen minutes and made it to the car as my dad was pulling away. I jumped into the moving vehicle like an action star in a buddy film. The image was lost after I buckled up and my dad told me I narrowly missed the worst grounding of my life.
    I slept the first four hours of the drive and then flicked through the dismal radio station options for the next two, until my dad told me that he was going to rip my arm off and beat me over my head with it if I didn’t stop. We discussed the open cases on the Spellman calendar for the final three hours. What we didn’t talk about was Uncle Ray, not for even a minute. We stopped for a quick lunch and arrived in Vegas shortly before 4:00 P.M .

    Ignoring the DO NOT DISTURB sign, my dad banged on the door to room 385 of the Excalibur, I think even louder than he banged on my door that morning. There was no answer and my father managed to convince the hotel manager to open the room for us. A commingling of scents greeted us at the door—stale cigar smoke, flat day-old beer, and the sour, distinctive odor of vomit. Fortunately, the manager excused