Read Online Rainy City by Earl Emerson - Free Book Online

side, so it was hard to build a case on Holder. I guess he’s always had woman trouble. They say he’s married and divorced the same woman five or six times. Cuckoo.”
    “That sucker is almost as mean as I am.” Smithers exploded into laughter.
    “Met a great gal,” said Smithers, walking me to the door. “I found this place that’s just incredible for meeting real women.”
    “A club or something?”
    “It’s called Overeaters Anonymous.”
    He was serious. I guess if he was hunting for the reincarnation of his ex-wife, that was the place to hunt. It was my turn to laugh, but I did it after Smithers had closed the door.
    It took ten minutes to cycle to the Hopewell Clinic. Burgling the Hopewell would best be done during the next nuclear war. It squatted on one of the busiest blocks on Capitol Hill. Across the street stood a gay bar, open and overflowing with noisy crowds until all hours. Behind the clinic was a well-lit parking lot, and fronting the lot, with a clear view of the backside of the clinic, stood a four-story apartment house. Cater-cornered from the clinic was a bustling all-night grocery store.
    On its own, the clinic posed no problems. A converted mansion, it was splintered into offices and meeting areas. I could have picked a lock or jimmied a window in a minute. The hitch was, I would have to be invisible to pull it off. Perhaps if I suited up in a uniform, a police uniform… I’d used the ploy before, but somehow I wasn’t that desperate. Not yet.
    I got home at one, soaked to the skin from the rain. The coffee-colored van was still slotted across the street, but it had been moved several parking spaces farther north. It was impossible to see through the dark windshield. I dragged out a pair of battered Bushnell’s, focused them, jotted down the plate number, and phoned it to Smithers. Twenty minutes later, Smithers returned my call and advised me that it belonged to one of my neighbors, a guy who lived six houses down. I wondered why I had never noticed it before.
    I began simmering a stew, fooled with the weights and a jump rope in the spare bedroom for an hour, skimmed the afternoon paper and then dipped into a piping-hot tub. On cue, the back door opened. I could tell who it was by the footsteps. I had just gotten the .45 hidden under a towel when she came around the corner and sat on the throne, sorting her rain-soaked mail.
    “You botched the stew,” said Kathy, without looking at me. “The meat’s burned.”
    She had changed her clothes. She wore a pantsuit, a frilly white blouse and a black string bow tie. She looked very much the way I expected a lady lawyer to look.
    When I had arranged the washcloth in a satisfactory formation, I spoke. “How’dit go downtown? You guys get an injunction?”
    “We didn’t get anything.” She looked up and frowned when she noticed the washcloth. Pulled back into a severe bun, her hair glistened like a lump of shiny wet coal.
    “What do you mean?”
    “Burton chickened out. He’s afraid of his father-in- law. He thinks Angus will run off to Brazil and take Angel if he makes any legal moves.” Kathy shook her head and scanned the rest of her mail.
    “That’s foolish.”
    “I know. But he’s such a loving man, it’s hard to get ticked off at him.”
    “There’s a difference,” I said, “between being loving and being a doormat.”
    “What’d you find out about Melissa?”
    “That she phoned her aunt last Tuesday and was expecting to be in Bellingham Wednesday morning with her daughter.”
    “With Angel?”
    “That’s what she told her aunt. She phoned from Tacoma. She know anybody in Tacoma?”
    Kathy hummed and thought about it. “Not that I can recall.”
    “She still might turn up on her own.”
    “I noticed tonight’s paper on the table. Read it yet?” “The reward was there again. Same wording and phone number as before.”
    “Maybe we should dial it and see who answers.”
    “It’s a recording. Leave your name