Read Online A Ticket to the Boneyard by Lawrence Block - Free Book Online Page B

my hotel. There weren’t any messages in my box, but while I was checking I collected the letters I’d left behind the previous night. There was some junk mail, and a credit-card bill, and there was an envelope with no return address and my name and address block-printed in ballpoint.
    It was the same story clipped from the same paper. No note with it, nothing scribbled in the margins. Something made me read it all the way through, word for word. The way you’ll watch a sad old movie, hoping this time it’ll have a happy ending.
     
Chapter 5
     
    United had a nonstop out of La Guardia at 1:45 that was due into Cleveland at 2:59. I put a clean shirt and a change of socks and underwear in a briefcase along with a book I was trying to read and took a cab to the airport. I was early, but after I’d had a bite in the cafeteria and read the
Times
through and called Elaine I didn’t have long to wait.
    We were on time getting off and five minutes early at Cleveland-Hopkins International. Hertz had the car I’d reserved, a Ford Tempo, and the clerk gave me an area map with my route to Massillon marked out for me with a yellow highlighter. I followed her directions and made the drive in a little over an hour.
    On the way, it occurred to me that it was just as well driving was one of those things you didn’t forget how to do, because I’d done precious little of it in recent years. Unless there was a time I was forgetting, it had been over a year since I’d been behind a steering wheel. Last October Jan Keane and I had rented a car and driven to the Amish country around Lancaster, Pennsylvania, for a long weekend of turning leaves and folksy inns and Pennsylvania Dutch cooking. It started off well but we’d been having our problems and I suppose the weekend was an attempt to cure them, and that’s a lot of weight for five days in the country to carry. Too much weight, as it turned out, because we were sullen and sour with each other by the time we got back to the city. We both knew it was over, and not just the weekend. In that sense you could say the trip accomplished what it was supposed to, though not what we wanted it to.
     
     
    Police Headquarters in Massillon is housed in a modern building downtown on Tremont Avenue. I left the Tempo in a lot down the street and asked the desk officer for a Lieutenant Havlicek, who turned out to be a big man with close-cropped light brown hair and some extra weight in the gut and jowls. He wore a brown suit and a tie with brown and gold stripes, and he had a wedding ring on the appropriate finger and a Masonic ring on the other hand.
    He had his own office, with pictures of his wife and children on his desk and framed testimonials from civic groups on one wall. He asked how I took my coffee, and he fetched it himself.
    He said, “I was juggling three things when you called this morning, so let me see if I got it straight. You’re with the NYPD?”
    “I used to be.”
    “And you’re working private now?”
    “With Reliable,” I said, and showed him a card. “But this matter doesn’t involve them, and I don’t have a client. I’m here because I think the Sturdevant killing might tie in with an old case of mine.”
    “How old?”
    “Twelve years old.”
    “From when you were a police officer.”
    “That’s right. I arrested a man with a history of violence toward women. He took a couple shots at me with a .25, so that was the major charge against him, and he wound up pleading to a reduced count of attempted aggravated assault. The judge gave him less time than I thought he deserved, but he got into trouble in prison and didn’t get out until four months ago.”
    “I gather you figure it’s a shame he got out at all.”
    “The warden at Dannemora says he killed two inmates for sure and was the odds-on suspect in three or four other homicides.”
    “Then why is he walking around?” He answered his own question. “Although there’s a difference between knowing a