Read Online Ken Kuhlken_Hickey Family Mystery 02 by The Venus Deal - Free Book Online

traffic got Hickey distracted. He passed Murphy and Associates, parked down the street, and walked back. The office window was papered with photos of houses, estates, farms, hotels, bank buildings, each priced about triple what they might’ve asked last year. Most of them bought and sold by investors, Hickey knew. It wasn’t a time for working people to buy a piece of earth and settle down. Everybody had gotten upturned by the war. Some fought. Many worked two jobs, volunteered with the Red Cross or YMCA giving comfort to the GIs and sailors. Others, plenty of them—hookers, realtors, and opportunists like Tom Hickey—found their angle and raked in loot.
    A few of the properties, the ones priced shockingly low, were located up north, from Redding to the coast and north into Oregon. Seaside or pine forest lots with log or stone cabins, trout streams or salmon fishing nearby, five hundred dollars or so. Summers before the war, Hickey and family used to drive north, rent a cabin, fish, hike, and ride horses until their spirits got refueled and they could tackle another year. If he had to chase Cynthia in that direction, he could keep a lookout, maybe buy a couple acres, now that he possessed Ben Franklins enough to toss one in the air if he felt like checking the wind.
    As he stepped into the office, a bell attached to the door clanged, yet the receptionist didn’t look up from her dime romance until Hickey’d gazed around at the gray walls blighted with diplomas and plaques, and at the four steel desks cluttered as if a bomb scare had chased everybody else away, and drummed his fingers on the counter for a minute.
    Like somebody too busy carousing to sleep except daytimes on weekends, she creaked out of the chair, stretched her puffy eyes open. Her legs were short, hips sprawling as though molded to fit the chair. On the way to the counter she smeared on lipstick, smooched it around, and gave a smile she might’ve learned at gunpoint.
    “You’re an investor, I bet.”
    “Yep,” Hickey said. “You’re a broker?”
    “Naw, Mr. Murphy’s the broker. I like your tie.”
    “Be nice, I’ll buy you one like it for Christmas. Murphy in?” He gave her a business card from Rudy’s.
    “I’ll go see.” She swished between the desks to a rear office, poked her head in, and delivered the card, then stepped out and beckoned Hickey with a finger. As she blockaded half the doorway, he had to brush her arm and skirt to get by. The door shut and left Hickey facing a blond man aged thirty or less, whose bulky shoulders, in a tan woolen suit coat, slumped as if they each carried a bag of cement. He was behind an oak desk, sitting in a wheelchair.
    Hickey reached across the desk. The man either grimaced or smiled. Everything about him looked woeful. His firm handshake seemed to require mighty effort. “Chet Murphy.” He plucked off his tortoiseshell glasses and set them atop a stack of legal papers. “This morning’s been a rush. We’ve taken on several new properties.” He didn’t talk with the brash prattle of most salesmen. His pitch seemed to imply: buy something, see if you can make me less miserable. “We have some exquisite harbor view lots in the South Bay and Coronado.”
    Hickey decided to play along, see if it got him more than the truth had gleaned from the Catholics. “I’m looking farther north. A lake, a river, mountains. Tahoe. Maybe Shasta.”
    “I can help you there.”
    “Tell you what. I got a referral to Laurel Tucker.”
    Murphy’s eyes narrowed and his hands rose stiffly from his lap to splay out flat on the desk. “Laurel,” he snapped, “is bright, competent. Unfortunately, she’s out of town, on business.”
    Hickey would’ve bet his share of Rudy’s against an ice-cream pushcart that this fellow’s grudge against Laurel cut far deeper than professional jealousy. “She up north?”
    Murphy’s hands folded around a pencil, as though to squeeze the lead out. “You’re looking for a