Read Online Tears Are for Angels by Paul Connolly - Free Book Online Page B

memory.
        As for the rest of it, as soon as I was on the road to recovery from my arm operation I called in Jordan again. His quick lawyer's eyes narrowed when I told him what I wanted.
        "Don't be a fool, Harry!"
        "And then," I said, "you take what you get for it and settle up my debts and buy me the old Caldwell place."
        He shook his head.
        "They must have you doped up."
        "Look, Brax. You just do what I say. Let the bright remarks go."
        He chewed furiously at his cigar. It was nearly as big as he was. Brax Jordan was a little fellow, not much over five-four. His head, set solidly on amazingly wide shoulders, seemed far too big for his body.
        Maybe that head was just bulging with brain. A lot of people thought so, anyway. He had smashed all records at law school, and when he finished he could have had his pick of jobs with any number of big-city law firms. Yet he had come back to St. Johns to open his own practice.
        Oddly enough, it had made him rich, because he combined his law work with some of the shrewdest farm real-estate deals the county had ever seen. His holdings were far bigger than mine, although he owned no single piece of land as big as the London place.
        His father and my father had been friends, and in the same way, Brax and I were friends too. It was more than an acquaintance growing out of business relations. He and I had hunted together and fished together and grown up together. When the other kids had ragged him about his size, I had used my own big body to shut them up.
        He had paid that debt back, years later, by doing his best to make the county accept Lucy, although he had never been able to force her down their throats.
        He took the cigar out of his mouth and looked at me. the big head shaking slightly from side to side.
        "Harry, you and I have been friends a mighty long time. Now I'm a lawyer and I take that seriously. Mighty seriously. And you own the best and biggest farm in this part of the state. As a lawyer and even more as your friend, I can't let you sell that farm for the peanuts it'll bring compared to what it's worth. And even if I could, I'll be damned if I'd turn around and buy that damn desert with the money."
        "All right. I'll get Murdoch Smith to handle it."
        He snorted. "He'd skin your eyebrows. Harry, you have to snap out of this."
        "Out of what?"
        "Whatever it is. There's no sense in any of it. So Lucy got crazy ideas in her head. So you're all cut up. That's understandable. But for the Lord's sake, man, you can't chuck everything for the rest of your life!"
        "I don't aim to."
        "Then what the hell do you want with the Caldwell place? There's not a building on it. It won't even grow sandspurs."
        "The hell with it, Brax. You want to handle it?"
        He got up and went over to the window and flipped the cigar out.
        "No. Get yourself another boy."
        "All right. You mind calling Smith lo come over?"
        He looked at me steadily.
        "Goddamn your eyes," he said. "Goddamn Smith, too. I'll get to work on it."
        "Good. Anything you get over what it costs for the Caldwell place and maybe a thousand dollars, fix it up for…" I thought a minute. "For the polio foundation."
        Brax shook his head from side to side, slowly. His mouth was slightly open.
        "Close your mouth," I said. "I'll tell you once and that's all. That farm is what did this to me and Lucy. That and-something else. I don't want to see the place again, or hear about it, or have money from it, or any goddamn thing at all. I don't want to even think about it. Now-you see?"
        "Maybe. But now about the something else?"
        "I'll fix the something else, too. Sometime."
        He looked at me shrewdly.
        "I never would have thought it," he said. "Old Puritan Harry London. The guy who could preach whole sermons