Read Online Full Frontal Murder by Barbara Paul - Free Book Online Page B

nose. “Perlmutter has a good chance. Does she?”
    â€œShe does if she studies—and she’s motivated. Remember who her boss is.”
    Murtaugh half-laughed. “DiFalco’s going to raise holy hell if I take another of his detectives.”
    â€œOh, let him. He doesn’t deserve Gloria.”
    â€œMeaning I do? Careful, Marian, that sounds like flattery.”
    â€œAh. Gotta watch that.”
    When she reached her office, she found a phone message from O’Toole saying that Gordon Egrorian, the owner of Maids-in-a-Row, would be in that afternoon to help build a computer face for Consuela Palmero. Perlmutter was back from talking to Rita Galloway’s therapist. But first Marian took Bobby’s crayon drawing of a cow and taped it to her file cabinet. A cow! What did city kids know of cows? Bobby had seen pictures, of course; bovines probably seemed like exotic animals to him.
    â€œA purple cow?” Perlmutter’s voice said over her shoulder.
    Marian sat down at her desk. “Bobby Galloway’s work.”
    â€œYeah?” He peered at the drawing closely. “Not bad for a four-year-old. Not quite anatomically correct, but careful otherwise. The kid thought about what he was drawing.”
    â€œSo, what did you get from the therapist?”
    Perlmutter took a chair. “Not a whole lot. Rita Galloway’s been seeing Dr. David Zukan for fourteen months. He says she consulted him for help in dealing with her frustration and anger generated by a stressful marriage. Her anger was affecting her work as an artist, but she had made great strides in learning to deal with the anger.”
    Marian growled. “‘Learning to deal with’—that’s one of those phrases like ‘come to terms with’… they don’t mean anything. Is she overcoming her anger or just co-existing with it?”
    â€œI don’t know, Lieutenant. Zukan wouldn’t get any more specific than that. When I asked him if she was a pathological liar, he objected to the word ‘pathological.’ But then he added that all his patients lie to him at one time or another.”
    â€œSo Rita Galloway does lie, but Hugh Galloway overstated the extent of her lying?”
    â€œThat’s the way I read it, yeah.”
    â€œWho made the arrangements for therapy, Hugh or Rita?”
    â€œRita. Zukan has never met Hugh, and knows him only through Rita’s eyes.”
    â€œYet it was Hugh’s insistence that she go into therapy—or was it? Did he say that, or do we just have Rita’s word for it?”
    Perlmutter took out his notebook and flipped through it. “He said only that she was in therapy. And that he’d been paying the bills for over two years—but it’s been only fourteen months.”
    Marian discounted that. “That’s the sort of exaggeration any aggrieved husband would make. He did say she was in therapy for her lying and her nymphomania, though. And Zukan said she came to him for help in dealing with her anger.”
    â€œThose could be the same thing,” Perlmutter pointed out. “Zukan wouldn’t tell me how her anger expressed itself. Patient confidentiality.”
    Marian mulled that over and conceded the point. “God, these are slippery people! Impossible to pin down.”
    â€œTalk to friends, associates?”
    â€œNot yet. If it looks likely that the kidnapping and the bombing are the work of neither Rita nor Hugh—which I suspect is the case—then I don’t want to waste any more time on the Galloways’ domestic problems. Let’s wait and see what O’Toole turns up about the cleaning lady who isn’t a cleaning lady.”
    It was over an hour before O’Toole brought the news that he’d run into a dead end. The address on 177th Street was a garage. He’d asked there and in a few other places nearby, but no one knew a Consuela Palmero. O’Toole had