Read Online Prayers for Rain by Dennis Lehane - Free Book Online Page A

paper.
    Joella Thomas rolled a Life Saver from side to side in her mouth and nodded. “Said the ‘afterlife’?”
    “Yeah?”
    “Ain’t nothing but a house party.”
    “Good news. I’ll tell the wife.” Larry closed his paper, tossed it into the van behind him. “Fucking Sox, Detective, you know what I’m saying?”
    Joella Thomas shrugged. “I’m a hockey fan.”
    “Fucking Bruins, then, too.” Larry turned his back to us and foraged in the forensics van.
    Joella Thomas started to turn away, then seemed to remember my presence. She rolled her head back slowly in my direction, looked at me through the dusky gold lenses of her rimless sunglasses. “What?”
    “Detective Thomas?” I proffered my hand.
    She gave the fingers a quick squeeze and squared her shoulders so that she was facing me.
    “Patrick Kenzie. Devin Amronklin may have mentioned me.”
    She cocked her head and I heard the Life Saver rattle against a back tooth. “Couldn’t come by the station, Mr. Kenzie?”
    “I thought I’d speed things up.”
    She placed her hands in the pockets of her suit jacket, leaned back on her heels. “Don’t like being in a police station since you brought down a cop, that it, Mr. Kenzie?”
    “The cells do seem that much closer.”
    “Uh-huh.” She stepped back as Larry and two other forensics cops walked between us.
    “Detective,” I said, “I’m real sorry an investigation of mine led to the arrest of a fellow—”
    “Blah, blah, blah.” Joella Thomas waved a long hand in front of my face. “Don’t care about him, Mr. Kenzie. He was old school, old boy network.” She turned toward the curb. “I look old school to you?”
    “Anything but.”
    Joella Thomas was a slim six feet tall. She wore an olive double-breasted suit over a black T-shirt. Her gold shield hung from black nylon cord around her neck and matched the gold of the three hoop earrings in her left earlobe. The right lobe was as bare and smooth as her shaven head.
    As we stood on the sidewalk, the deepening heat and morning dew rose off the pavement in a fine mist. It was early Sunday morning and the yuppies’ Krups coffeemakers were probably just beginning to percolate, the dog walkers just arriving at the doors.
    Joella stripped off a twist of foil on her roll of Life Savers and removed one. “Mint?”
    She extended the roll and I took one.
    “Thanks.”
    She placed the roll back in the pocket of her suit jacket. She looked back in the alley, then up at the roof.
    I followed her gaze. “Jumper?”
    She shook her head. “Faller. Went on the roof to shoot up during a party. Sat on the edge, spiked, and looked up at the stars.” She pantomimed someone leaning too far back. “Must have seen a comet.”
    “Ouch,” I said.
     
    Joella Thomas tore off a piece of her scone and dipped it in her oversize mug of tea before sliding it onto her tongue. “So you want to know about Karen Nichols.”
    “Yup.”
    She chewed, then swallowed a sip of tea. “You worried she was pushed?”
    “Was she?”
    “Nope.” She sat back in her chair, watched an old man toss small pieces of bread to some pigeons outside. The old man’s face was pinched and small and his nose was hooked so that he looked a lot like the birds he fed. We were in Jorge’s Cafe de Jose, a block from the crime scene. Jorge’s served nine different types of scones, a variety of fifteen muffins, squares of tofu, and seemed to have cornered the market on bran.
    Joella Thomas said, “It was suicide.” She shrugged. “It was clean—death by gravity. No signs of struggle, no scuff marks from other shoes anywhere near the place she jumped from. Hell, it doesn’t get any cleaner.”
    “And her suicide made sense?”
    “In what way?”
    “She’d been melancholy over the boyfriend’s accident, et cetera?”
    “One assumes.”
    “And that would be enough?”
    “Oh, I see what you’re getting at.” She nodded, then shook her head. “Look, suicides? They rarely make