Read Online Best Friends by Thomas Berger - Free Book Online

switched it with the Jeep Grand Cherokee we use, because I don’t have a garage where I live and I don’t like to leave a valuable automobile outside all night.”
    â€œWhere’d you go then?” Albrecht asked. “And what did you do?”
    â€œDrove home, drank a beer, put on the TV, and fell asleep immediately. I woke up in the middle of the night and went to bed…. Now, keep your part of the bargain.”
    â€œWhat time did you get home?”
    â€œTennish, ten-thirty?”
    â€œAnd you didn’t leave again?”
    â€œNot till this morning.” Roy snorted. “Don’t tell me Holbrook claims I followed him and beat him up further. I hit him exactly once, in the solar plexus.”
    â€œIt’s not Martin Holbrook who was found dead,” Albrecht said in an official-sounding drone, “but Mrs. Francine Wilkie Holbrook. It’s a homicide. Nobody beats themself to death, alone in an apartment.”
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    â€œMy God, how terrible!” said Kristin, whom Roy had phoned at the bank.
    â€œI couldn’t upset Sam with this.” He found his voice hard to control. “We were just talking about her yesterday.”
    â€œWhere are you calling from?”
    â€œThe lobby of the Municipal Building.”
    â€œYou’re free to leave?”
    â€œYes, I am,” said Roy. “I can’t believe they ever thought I did it, and they never charged me with anything, which is why I didn’t call my lawyer till the whole thing was almost over, and then of course he’s in court and hasn’t gotten back to me…. I’m running off at the mouth. This thing has really shaken me up.”
    â€œYou wouldn’t be much of a person if it didn’t,” Kristin said. “Stay where you are. I’ll be right over to get you.”
    When the report came in that Martin Holbrook’s dead body had been found with an accompanying suicide note, the police were abruptly and unapologetically finished with Roy. He learned later that Holbrook had deposited the children at school, then returned home to a self-inflicted death by an unlicensed .32-caliber pistol, leaving behind the note confessing, or perhaps bragging, that he had furnished his ex-wife with the punishment the slut had long deserved. But nobody at headquarters gave a full account to Roy. He now felt abandoned by all, alone with the awful conviction that had he not humiliated Holbrook in Francine’s presence, both of them would be alive today.
    That Holbrook had been at The Hedges at the same time as they was no coincidence: Obviously Francine had set up the encounter. But try as he would to blame the victims, rage against himself was Roy’s predominant emotion. By the use of poor judgment he had killed two persons. That a loser like Holbrook would have murdered Francine at another time was no mitigation, nor was the near certainty that she would have provided her ex with ample pretexts for rage. But would Roy have felt better if he had let Holbrook strangle her in the parking lot? There are times when all choices must, as if by divine law, be disastrous, but heretofore he had only heard of this as happening to others and more typically in works of the imagination than in the structurelessness of real life.
    It had been, to say the least, presumptive of him to call Kristin, but he had no one else to turn to at the moment. Sam was in the hospital in a delicate condition that might well be adversely affected by hearing his best friend’s awful news. All their lives, Robin had been the worst person with whom to seek solace. He did not dare approach her with anything to announce but a success, and of course she would endeavor to disparage that. A failure of any kind would make her crow. In the case at hand she would say, “Sleep with dogs, get up with fleas. What do you expect when a trollop is your idea of a suitable girlfriend?” Her idea of a woman for him was