The Wrecking Crew Read Online Free PDF

until now.
    He turned briefly at the door, waggled his hand in a half salute and looked at me casually, and I knew that he was double-checking, studying me from this new angle to make quite sure. After all, some time had passed. A horse born that night would be a pretty old nag by now. It was a wife and three kids ago for me. But he had a good eye, a trained eye, and he knew me, all right, and he went out without saying a word, which was the significant thing. He had recognized me, but he kept his mouth shut. It could mean a lot of things. After all, I wasn’t joyously recalling auld lang syne, either.
    “Who’s he?” I asked, when he was gone.
    “Jim?” Lou Taylor shrugged her shoulders. “Just a friend. He’s kind of nice, actually. He’s the Stockholm representative for a U.S. plastics firm, if it makes a difference… Scotch or gin? I recommend the Scotch. The gin you get here isn’t fit to drink.”
    “In that case, Scotch,” I said.
    “I just want to get one thing straight, Helm,” she said, turning to face me with the glass in her hand. “On the phone, you sounded as if you were planning to go up to Kiruna all alone. Well, don’t kid yourself. This is my article, and I’m going to be right beside you when you shoot the pictures. I don’t know much about photography, but I know the stuff I want, and I’m at least going to see that you get it down on film, whether or not it gets used later.”

5
    It came so easily and naturally that it caught me by surprise. I’d expected to have to work for it. I’d thought she’d at least try to be cute about it. It was such a simple and obvious test.
    “Try her,” Mac had said. “If she’s willing to let you go up to the Arctic and shoot these mining pictures all by yourself, her article is probably as innocent as it seems, and you’re wasting your time. In that case, you’ll have to dig up another lead somewhere. But if she insists on coming with you, you may be in business.” He hesitated. “Eric.”
    “Sir?”
    “Strictly speaking, the sex of your quarry has not yet been determined. I speak of him as a man only because Taylor’s article refers to him as a man. But Taylor’s information should not be accepted uncritically. We don’t know where he got it or how reliable it is. He may even have had reasons for being deliberately misleading. As for the wife, nobody seems to know too much about her. Apparently she’s just an American kid he met in Rome a few years back; everybody was rather surprised when they got married, since he hadn’t been considered good matrimonial material.” Mac smiled thinly. “Anyway, just because a suspect is female doesn’t mean that she can be safely disregarded. Keep it in mind.”
    I was keeping it in mind as I faced Mrs. Taylor in her hotel room. It wasn’t hard to do. She had no appeal for me at the moment. I’ve never had much use for women in pants. When I mentioned this idiosyncrasy to a psychiatrist friend, he said it was a subconscious defense mechanism against my incipient homosexual tendencies. He had me worried for a while, until I discovered that he explained all human behavior on the grounds of incipient homosexual tendencies. He was even writing a book about his theory, but I don’t think he ever finished it. Somebody else beat him to it. The competition in the field of psychiatric theories is fierce these days.
    Anyway, a woman in pants has very little interest for me, as a woman, and that goes double for all the strange britches women have taken to parading around in lately. Mrs. Taylor’s snugly fitting nether garments—I wouldn’t know precisely what to call them—came to an arbitrary end just below her calves, so that they looked like slacks badly shrunk in the wash. She was wearing soft black slippers. Her hair was dark, cut off short, and brushed back over her ears boyishly.
    I couldn’t help remembering that this was, or had been, a married woman, and wondering what her husband had