Read Online Pale Gray for Guilt by John D. MacDonald - Free Book Online Page A

goof so completely I didn't even feel as if I knew you? How about this con you almost worked on me about being retired. How about the way I tried to pump Meyer about you, and he showed speed and footwork like you couldn't believe? How about that kind of grim professional bit with the camera and the hoist and the wire and all, so totally concentrated I could have been walking around on my hands with a rose in my teeth without getting a glance from you? How about my gnawing little suspicion that you aren't going up to Frostproof to comfort this Janine, but to go pry information out of her? Enemy country, you said. Maybe for you the whole world is enemy country McGee. But somehow it would sort of fit one lousy guess, which would be a batch of official cars screaming up and the boys in blue jumping out, and a big loudspeaker yammering for you to come out quietly or they lob in the tear gas."
    "You are a warm broad. You are a warm nosey broad."
    "So I have this eccentricity, maybe. You know, a social flaw. Some kind of insecurity reaction or something. I started sleeping with somebody and I get this terrible curiosity about them."
    "So? I could have the same trouble too. But I haven't asked questions. Or tried to find out things I could find out, without much trouble, probably"
    She was quiet for a long time. I glanced at her. Her hands were folded in her lap and she was biting at sucked-in lips.
    "Fair is fair," she said. "When it's time to tell you, I will tell you. Not in words, but in writing, so that I get it down exactly right. Not that it is so earthshattering or anything. But for now, for reasons I think are pretty good reasons, I want to keep it to myself. Fair being fair, if you have good reasons, okay, I ask no more."
    So I told her the retirement was accurate, except I am taking it in little hunks whenever I can afford it. "It's a tricky, complex, indifferent society, Puss. It's a loophole world. And there are a lot of clever animals who know how to reach through the loopholes and pick the pockets of the unsuspecting. Carefully done, the guy who has been plucked clean has no way of getting it back. There are a thousand perfectly legal acts that can be immoral, or amoral, acts. Then the law officers have no basis of action. Attorneys can't help. The pigeon might just as well have dropped his wallet into a river full of crocodiles. He knows right where it is. And all he can do is stand on the muddy shore and wring his hands. So I'm the salvage expert. And I've "own a lot of crocodiles. So I make a deal with him. I dive down, bring it up, and split it with him, fifty-fifty. When a man knows his expectation of recovery is zero, recovering half is very attractive. If I don't make it, I'm out expenses:"
    "Or you are a dainty dish for the crocs, man." "So far I've been indigestible. Now Janine Bannon is a client. She doesn't know it yet. Tush would have been. A client in the classic sense of the legal squeeze. I don't understand the killing. They didn't need that. I know one thing. I have to watch myself on this one. Strangers make the best clients. Then -I can play the odds and stay cold. Here I'm too emotionally hung up. I'm too angry, too sick at heart. A dirty, senseless act. So I have to watch it."
    She pondered it for a time. "Just one thing that bothers me, darling. How do you find… enough new clients?"
    I told her how I had found the last one, by combing very carefully through all the local items in the fat Sunday edition of a Miami paper. Of the items I marked that looked interesting, one was an apologetic announcement from a stamp collector's club that Mr. So-and-So, a very long and complicated Greek name, the well-known restauranteur had, at the last minute, decided to withdraw from the exhibition and not show his complete and extremely valuable collection of Greek postage stamps, which had included the famous 1857 Dusty Rose, which had brought $21,000 at a New York auction house in 1954:
    I'd called an officer of