Read Online City of the Sun by David Levien - Free Book Online Page B

could tell she was acting. Still, the woman was homebound and he knew many senior citizens kept odd hours. Either they couldn’t sleep and stayed up late or they couldn’t sleep late and woke up early. And for a woman like this, myopic though she might have been, what else did she have to do but look out her windows? “I was wondering if I could come in and talk about the case?”
    Behr watched her fear of strangers wrestle with her desire for company. “I don’t know if I should.”
    He flashed his license, which he kept in a billfold with his old three-quarter shield. Then he took out the school picture of Jamie. “This is him. Maybe you saw him riding his bike?” She looked at the picture of the kid, with his cute little cowlick, and that did it. She swung the door open.
    “I’m afraid I don’t know anything about the case,” she said, her voice tremulous with the effort of walking down the hall. “But I’ll answer any questions I can.” She led him into the living room and a stabbing prickle went down Behr’s spine at what he saw there — stacks and stacks of newspapers. The room was filled with them, the
Star
, years’ worth of them, unread. Many yellowing. Mrs. Conyard saw Behr looking. “I always mean to read the paper at night, but I end up watching television. …” Behr nodded to keep her going. “I like solving the puzzles on
Wheel
and I end up putting it off to another day.” With the amount of unread papers she had in there, Behr wouldn’t have been surprised if she believed Carter was still in office.
    “You know, Mrs. Conyard, I wonder if I could look through your papers, see if you got yours that day?”
    “Sure, sure, go ahead,” she told him. Behr was already kneeling and poring over the stacks for the dates close to the day of the disappearance. “I keep meaning to get rid of the old ones. … Maybe they’ll be good for something.”
    There was a loose sort of left-to-right organization to the papers. Within ten minutes Behr had found October of the correct year and saw what didn’t completely surprise him. She had all the papers leading up to the day, but no paper from the day Jamie went missing. There was no paper for two days after that, either. Mrs. Conyard remembered the interruption in service. It was disconcerting to her. Then the delivery service resumed, on the third day. “A little brown man. In a car. That’s the way they do it now,” she told him.
    “That’s progress,” Behr said, looking not at her but through the nearby stacks of papers to make sure that none were misfiled. None were. Her order was fairly meticulous.
    “You know what?” Mrs. Conyard told him, memory’s light breaking across her face. “Now I
do
remember the police stopping by and asking questions.” Behr nodded his support for her recollection, which unfortunately contained no other hard information. She hadn’t seen any suspicious cars or people then or since. “It’s a very safe neighborhood. That’s why I’ve stayed all these years since my husband died.”
    She moved across the room to a portrait of her late husband that rested on the television. “This is Mr. Conyard … my John …” She held it out for Behr’s inspection. He looked it over and planned his exit.
     
     
    Behr spent the next several hours in his car, parked on Tibbs, on the cell phone with the circulation department of the
Star
. It took a good while before he got the right person, a Susan Durant, who had been there many years and had a handle on things, and a memory to boot. She recalled them losing their delivery boy. It was a sad day at the paper even though no one remembered ever having met him. And there was a near mutiny in Circ. when the story only got under-the-fold coverage. She checked the logs and saw that the resident at 5 Tibbs had complained and been credited for no delivery on October 24. Several others from later in the route had made the same call. Susan also confirmed that there was no