Read Online Living Proof by John Harvey - Free Book Online

feet.
    "Of course."
    "Good. We Americans are big on breakfast meetings, you know."
    "Here?"
    "Half eight, how's that sound?"
    Pine. "
    "Good." And Mollie steered Cathy Jordan away towards their waiting car, while Resnick sat back oh the stool and nursed his way down the rest of his Highland Park.
    Art Tatum and Ben Webster: they did it for him every time. Resnick lowered the stylus with care and watched as it slid into the groove; listened, standing there, as Tatum played his practised, ornate way through the first chorus of the tune, tightening the rhythm at the beginning of the middle eight, before stepping aside with a simple little single-note figure, falling away beneath the glorious saxophone smear of Webster's arrival. Resnick turned up the volume and wandered through into the kitchen: coffee was pumping softly inside the silver pot on the stove. He set a match to the gas on the grill, sliced dark rye bread and put it to toast. Cream cheese, not too much pickled cucumber, smoked salmon. While none of the other cats were looking, he sneaked Bud a small piece of the salmon. Some days he liked to drink his coffee, rich and dark, from one of a pair of white china mugs, and this was one of those.
    Settled in his favourite chair in the living room, coffee and sandwich close at hand, album turned over and turned back down, Resnick lifted Cathy Jordan's book from the small table beneath the lamp and began to read: If anyone had told me, Annie Jones, you
    "II end up spending your seventh wedding anniversary alone in the front seat of a rented Chevrolet, outside of Jake's at the Lake in Tahoe City, I'd have told them to go jump right in it. The lake, that is. But then if that same anyone had told me, the day I appeared, fresh out of law school, ready to start work at the offices ofReigler and Reigler, bright and full a/promise in my newly acquired dove grey two-piece with a charcoal stripe, skirt a businesslike three inches below the knee, that I would swap what was clearly destined to be a famous legal career or that of a lowly private eye, I would gleefully have signed committal forms, assigning them to the nearest asylum, and tossed away the key.
    "You know, Annie," my mother had said, the first time I plucked up courage to explain, 'you can't really be a private eye, they only have them in the movies. And books. And besides, they're always men. "
    My mom. God bless her, always seemed to have a vested interest in remaining firmly behind the times.
    "Sure, Mom," I said, 'you're right. " And inched back the business card I had proudly given her, stuffing it back down into my wallet.
    There'd be another time.
    And so there had. My first major cheque safely paid into the bank and cleared, two other clients waiting in the wings, I had invited my long-suffering mother out for cocktails and dinner at her favourite Kansas City restaurant.
    I didn't mention that, did I? About my mother being from Kansas City.
    Well, that's an important part of it; it explains a great deal.
    But back to cocktails. Emboldened by the second Manhattan, I had showed my mother my bank balance and launched into the spiel.
    Adventure, independence, the chance to be my 62 own boss, run my own life "Mom, I'm a big girl now. This is what I want to do. You see, it'II work out fine."
    Which so far, pretty much, had been true. During my time practising law I had made a lot of useful contacts, in that profession as well as the police. I was in pretty thick with a few good working journalists, too the kind that still spend more time on the street than in the office staring at their computer screen.
    And Mom, I like to think, surprised herself with a smile of pride when some newfound friend asked over coffee,
    "Marjorie, just what is it that your daughter does out there in California?" And my mom, smiling, saying, "Oh, she's just a private eye."
    There were things about my life, though, that I didn 't tell her. A little knowledge may. in some circumstances, be a