Read Online It's a Crime by Jacqueline Carey - Free Book Online Page B

asked his parents to leave the room and then asked Pat to marry him. She said, “Wow, what an idea.” Suddenly she could make sense of the past few years: This must have been the direction they were heading in.
    Recovering at his parents’ house, Frank declared his intention of reading the Bud Caddy novels. Pat bought him a new copy of
Road Kill.
She didn’t want him reading hers. “It’s really good,” he said later, scratching under his cast with a straightened coat hanger. “Great sex.”
    “Sex?” Could he be joking? At this point all she could remember was a lot of shooting and drinking. “Like between a man and a woman?”
    “I’m not saying it was with you.”
    “Heaven forbid,” said Pat happily.
    Shortly before the wedding Lemuel Samuel published
Mallow,
in which all the murder and mayhem, the guns and the gore, revolved around one central female character.
    Mallow is the street name of a teenage runaway whose case still haunts Bud Caddy years later. Her father hired him to find her, claiming that the cops wouldn’t take him seriously because he smoked some marijuana now and then. Naturally Bud suggests smoking more. As they go on to other drugs, though, Bud begins to notice peculiarities about the man, who acts as if he’s in a time warp. Mallow turns out to be wary, screwed up, wild. She says her father sexually molested her. After many pharmaceuticals and much tight-lipped agony, Bud does not hand her over. Then he finds out that her story could not be true. The father, who was never the custodial parent, has been living in Mexico and hasn’t even seen her since she was a baby. Fifteen years later, he is dead, and Mallow shows up on Bud Caddy’s doorstep to ask him to solve his murder. This time as events unfold he refuses to be tricked, so he loses her again.
    Mallow has eyes “as green as go lights.” She has “fringe” toes. She has a bottom like “jungle fruit.” Once she gets the chance, she talks a blue streak in her “untamed soprano voice.”
    “My God, this is me!” Pat exclaimed to Frank as they lay on the beach at Ocean Grove. She recognized these descriptions. Lemuel had used every one while talking to her—more often in bars than in bed. It was as if he’d come up with his own version of her life while she was trying to figure out the real thing.
    When Pat married Frank in a very traditional white dress (floor-length satin, lace bodice, oversize bow in back), she walked down the aisle as Mallow. Everyone knew. The book had made the
Times
bestseller list the month before, the first of Lemuel Samuel’s mysteries to do so. Frank told all his friends and family, although none of them had any particular interest in fiction. “Hey, she’s got fringe toes,” he would say. “I’ve seen them.”
    Naturally most people had not read the book. But they knew its reputation. They assumed that Pat was as wild as this Mallow. After all, she had rolled around with the ruffian author for years. No one who knew her associated her with the more pathetic aspects of the character, of course; she was too young and fresh and warm. And enthusiastic. She still bubbled over. When a friend of Frank’s asked if she’d really run away, all she did was laugh. She laughed, too, when her mother said she thought the book captured her ex-husband’s sinister qualities. She laughed even when Frank said, jokingly, on their wedding night, “And I’m supposed to trust you?”
    Pat had called Ginny’s stepmother to get her address so that she could send her an invitation. That’s when she learned that Ginny had sold a story called “First Funeral” to
Clock
magazine, which was named after the publication in the Nero Wolfe books. So Ginny couldn’t have buried herself too far in the dark woods. She never did send in her response card, but she showed up, anyway. She was all in black, with purple lipstick, black fingernails, and a Celtic cross—not exactly a look that Pat associated with the state