Read Online Natural Causes by Jonathan Valin - Free Book Online Page A

picking up a piece of the
fading sunlight and tossing it brightly in the air. I went over to
the wall and looked.
    It was a hummingbird--no larger than a
butterfly-hanging above a bell-shaped flower. It darted away as
I came close to it, disappearing through an iron gate set in the
wall. Through the gate, I could see a street and several cars parked
in the shade of the oaks. I rattled the gate, but it had been locked
with a key.
    "C'mon, Harry," Jack said. "Helen's
waiting."
    We walked south beside the wall to the corner of the
court. A stucco building ran the length of the eastern edge of the
pavilion. If it weren't for the number of doors and windows set in
its facade, the building wouldn't have looked anything like a hotel.
Jack went up to one of the doors and knocked.
    "Just a goddamn minute!" someone inside
hollered.
    Jack smiled at me. "Fasten your seat belt,"
he said.
 
    10
    A few minutes passed, then a small, skinny woman in a
yellow poncho and black, ankle-length skirt opened the door. Her hair
was as thick, curly, and colorless as a Kewpie doll's, and like a
Kewpie doll's it was massed in girlish bangs above a lean,
hollow-cheeked face. There was nothing doll-like about the woman's
eyes, however. They were brown and bloodshot and circled with dark,
wrinkled flesh. The combination of that little-girl hairdo and those
bruised eyes gave Helen Rose the weepy, suffering, mortified look of
an abused child.
    "Oh, Jack, honey," she said in a pained,
husky voice. "I'm sorry for shouting like that. But I've had
Walt here all day long, and I just don't know what to do anymore."
    "You're going to sit down and have a drink,"
Jack said, taking charge. "And then you're going to have
something to eat."
    The woman smiled at him affectionately. "Baby,
what would I do without you?"
    Jack walked into the room, picked up the phone, and
ordered two double martinis. "Scotch for you, Harry?"
    "That'll be fine," I said.
    "And send us some menus," Jack said into
the phone.
    "Who's your attractive friend?" Helen Rose
said, giving me a look.
    "Harry Stoner." I held out a hand.
    "Helen Rose."
    We shook hands.
    "You're the detective, aren't you? I don't think
I've ever seen a detective before, unless one of my ex-husbands had
me tailed by one. As they used to say in the movies, you've got an
interesting face." She turned to Jack and said, "Hasn't he
got an interesting face?"
    Jack grinned.
    The woman turned back to me with a playful smile. She
had very white, very even teeth; and her smile made her look years
younger. "You'd make a good heavy. Wouldn't he, Jack?"
    Jack laughed. "I don't know about that."
    "Don't be disagreeable," the woman said. "I
say he'd make a good heavy, and I'm always right. Aren't I?"
    "Always," Jack said.
    She winked at me and walked over to one of a pair of
white sofas set in front of a tile fireplace. A log was burning on
the andirons, filling the room with a warm, cedary smell. It was a
big room, decorated in shades of white and pink.
    "You have no idea what I've been through today,"
Helen Rose said to Jack. "Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, give me
strength. Do you know what our friend told me? Or should I say
demanded?"
    "What?" Jack said irritably.
    "He told me that he was going to quit and take
the rest of the team with him, unless we gave him Quentin's job."
    "He's bluffing," Jack said.
    The woman flapped one of her hands equivocally.
"Maybe. Maybe not. You never know with a fegalah."
    "Never fuck a fag, Harry," she said,
looking up at me.
    "I don't intend to."
    She laughed abruptly. "Christ, what a mess!
Maybe he's bluffing. Who knows? He says he's been carrying Quentin
for the past two years, and now he wants to get paid for it.
    "He probably has been," Jack said.
    "That's beside the point," Helen Rose said.
"And he knows it and you know it and so do I. He's got us over a
barrel, Jack." She looked up at the high, beamed ceiling.
"Quentin, damn you, why did you do this to me? Why did you leave
me like this? Just when I