Read Online A Few Minutes Past Midnight by Stuart M. Kaminsky - Free Book Online

over, Gunther and I headed for Fourteenth Place. I turned on the radio. It crackled to music and settled into “There’s a Small Hotel.” When it finished, a baritone voice announced that we were listening to “Claude Thornhill’s All Navy Show.” Before we reached Fiona Sullivan’s we heard Thornhill’s renditions of “Portrait of a Guinea Farm” and a jazzy “Buster’s Last Stand.”
    Fiona Sullivan’s house was not as old as Mrs. Plaut’s and not as big. It was a boxy two-story on a small lot with almost identical houses on either side. There were a few cars on the street, but the houses had small driveways and separate wooden garages that didn’t look big enough for anything much larger than my Crosley. We parked and got out.
    It had turned dark and cloudy. There were lights on in Fiona Sullivan’s. When we stepped closer, I could see that the place needed more than a little work. Dirty white paint was flaking. Beneath the white was a darker color that could have been green.
    Some windows were open and I could hear something classical playing inside.
    “Schubert,” Gunther said. “A bit too melodic for my tastes.”
    I knocked. The door opened.
    The woman who stood there under the porch light was tall, stoop-shouldered, flat-chested, and pale. Her dark hair was tied in a tight bun and she wore round, rimless glasses over narrowed eyes. Her only makeup was a touch of pink in her cheeks that did not become her, and her only touch of near color was a large locket engraved with two silver birds with spread wings that hung from a silver chain around her neck.
    “Mrs. Sullivan?” I asked.
    “Miss,” she corrected, looking down at Gunther, her hand reaching up to touch her silver birds.
    “Miss Sullivan, can I ask you a few questions?”
    “Why?”
    “That is Schubert’s Unfinished ,” Gunther said.
    She looked down at Gunther.
    “Yes.”
    “A lovely piece,” Gunther said. “Schubert himself did not particularly care for it.”
    “Do you know Charlie Chaplin?” I asked.
    “Charlie Chaplin? How the hell would I know Charlie Chaplin?” she asked with a snort.
    “Do you know a man about five foot eight, thin hair, maybe wearing glasses, around forty?” I tried.
    “Probably no more than fifteen or twenty,” she said. “Half the men I know probably look like that.”
    “We understand you are contemplating marriage,” Gunther said. “Congratulations.”
    “Thanks,” Fiona Sullivan answered, but she didn’t look particularly happy.
    “Something wrong?” I asked.
    “Not your business,” she said.
    “I’m a private investigator,” I said, taking out my wallet and fumbling for my frayed license.
    She took the wallet, lifted her glasses, and squinted at the license. Then she handed it back.
    “How much you charge?”
    “Depends on what I’m asked to do.”
    “Howard’s missing,” she said. “My fiancé. Come in.” We stepped past her and she continued. “You believe in cards, astrology, the like?”
    Thinking of Juanita, I said, “There’s something to it.”
    “I don’t believe in that stuff. But I believe in fate and your coming to my door when I was thinking about what to do to find Howard, that’s fate.”
    She stepped ahead of us into a living room with dark wooden floors, a faded Navajo carpet, and gray mismatched chairs facing a sofa that strived for gray and came up sun bleached. The walls were lined with black-and-white photographs of women, studio head shots. I looked at them as Fiona Sullivan pointed toward the two chairs.
    “I worked on all those ladies,” she said proudly as I scanned the wall. “Adele Mara, Mary Beth Hughes, Janis Carter, Ann Dvorak, Helen Walker. And over there. That’s Joan Leslie.”
    “Impressive,” I said. “You stopped working.”
    “Arthritis,” she said. “Lost the touch.”
    “I’m sorry,” I said. “Your fiancé …”
    “Howard Sawyer,” she said. “You didn’t tell me what you charge.”
    “Twenty-five dollars a