Read Online Noir(ish) (9781101610053) by Evan Guilford-blake - Free Book Online

She skipped lunch hours in favor of putting in the extra time at her desk; carried the largest purse I’d ever seen, even larger than Lizabeth Duryea’s—and there was her musicianship. But I could live with her quirks. I had a few myself, and she was as dependable as Ted Williams with men on base and, besides, she was
just
my secretary. No matter what her aspirations might be.
That
was a mistake I didn’t plan to repeat.
    Gloria had barely had time to catch the elevator when the outside door opened and I saw two figures step through. One was small woman,
maybe
five feet, who would have been attractive if she weren’t taking pains not to be. The word “doll” came to mind: the porcelain voodoo variety. She looked like she might be old enough to dress herself, but just barely. The other was a tall, wide, hard-looking man with no expression on his face. Both of them were dressed in dark men’s suits and wore gloves—tight black leather gloves—and hats. Hers was a black derby; he had a little gray porkpie that looked like a rusty thimble perched on the head of Frankenstein’s monster.
    â€œBe with you in a minute,” I called.
    â€œYou Grahame?” the woman said.
    â€œBe right there.”
    â€œMy name’s Wilmah.” She strode into my office, the man a step behind her.
    She had a heavy East Coast accent. Boston or thereabouts, probably. Walter Dietrichson was from there. I’d met Wally while I was getting some more work done on my stomach; we were hospital roommates. He was, and is, a class guy who had had about as much chance of walking again as a quarter horse had of winning the Kentucky Derby: He’d fallen off a moving train en route from L.A. to a class reunion in Palo Alto. But he’d survived, nothing but a limp and a cane, and I had laughed with him and his wife over a drink to celebrate his ten-thousand-dollar insurance check from Pacific All-Risk. Wally’d been an oil engineer. Now, like Dan Scott, he was selling insurance, somewhere in the Valley, for a firm called Dietrichson, Keyes and Neff. We went fishing together whenever we could.
    â€œWilma what?” I said.
    The girl’s stark white face suddenly looked like it had been pulled out of boiling water.
    â€œWil
mer
,” the big guy said.
    He stood there, his hands hanging at his sides, looking like a mannequin that belonged in some store’s big-and-tall department. Except mannequins have smiles. This guy looked like whoever’d made him had forgotten what they looked like and decided a grim-lipped deadpan would do instead. He had to be six feet five and two hundred sixty pounds. None of which was fat. If he’d been on Fordham’s line, they wouldn’t have needed the other six blocks of granite. “Wilmer,” he repeated.
    I nodded. “Uh-
huh
.”
    The girl jacked a nail-bitten thumb at Stone Giant standing behind her. “And Elisha,” she muttered contentiously, daring me to disagree. Without changing his expression, Elisha nodded once.
    I put down my coffee—it was getting cold; I don’t like cold coffee—and stood up behind my desk. “My secretary is out right now,” I told Wilma. “She’ll be back in a few minutes, and when she
gets
back, she’ll be happy to make an appointment for you. I’m kinda busy at the moment, so if you’d like to come back in half an hour or—”
    â€œElisha,” said Wilma.
    The guy walked casually over to me, used one hand to lift me by the collar, stepped behind me, put me in a choke hold, lowered me to the floor, and stood there, calm as the barrel of a .38 just before someone squeezes the trigger, while I struggled—less to get away than to breathe.
    â€œYou know,” I squawked, “this isn’t a good way to begin an investigator-client relationship.”
    Wilma seemed unconcerned at the jeopardy. “Where’s da package,