Read Online The Chelsea Girl Murders by Sparkle Hayter - Free Book Online

completely in the clear then.”
    â€œYou haven’t been cleared officially, but I wouldn’t worry. Richard Bigger won’t officially clear you until they’ve arrested someone else. You know how he hates you, Robin.”
    â€œWho was this neighbor? Was it the bodybuilder?” I asked, and described him. “He seems to spend a lot of time in the hallway.”
    â€œHe told us he didn’t know anything. The neighbor who saw you was a man named Cleves, a tourist from San Diego. Didn’t see the actual crime, didn’t see anything else and was flying back west today. Robin, I’m beginning to believe you really do have a curse on your head,” she said, with her tony, uptown, Dalton School accent. June Fairchild of the NYPD was once known as “The Debutante Detective” because of her flawless social pedigree. I knew her from a previous unfortunate incident.
    â€œWhat about the frizzy-haired brunette, Maggie Mason?”
    â€œThe police weren’t able to interview her until this morning, but, she apparently has an alibi. She was on AOL in a comic-book chat at the time of the murder. I’ll try to keep you informed, as much as I can, Robin, but I’m taking a few days off to look after my daughter. She’s having her tonsils pulled. I have to go, Robin. I’ll talk to you later.”
    What a serene vacation it had been so far, I thought—an apartment building burns down and a dead man falls into my face. I was having dinner with Phil, from my old building, that evening. Phil’s philosophy was not to complain about bad things that happen, they might just prevent something worse. I’d have to ask him what horrible event could possibly be prevented by these disasters to make them somehow justifiable in the cosmic scheme of things. It would have to be a pretty bad event, like a sarin gas attack on the subway or a Pat Buchanan presidency.

chapter five
    â€œThe fire, it’s a shame, luv, but who knows? If it hadn’t happened, a week from now a gas pipe might have ruptured, blown up the building, and killed us all,” said Phil, lifting his big Thai beer in a salute to our good luck. We were sitting at a corner table at Regional Thai Taste, a restaurant on Seventh Avenue and Twenty-second Street.
    â€œExcept you. Somehow, you’d survive,” I said.
    Phil has survived an extraordinary number of disasters in his lifetime. This all began during World War Two, when Phil was a young British soldier in North Africa and the only survivor of an attack by Rommel. Since then, he’d pulled widows and babies out of fires, crawled out of the wreckage of plane crashes and ferry sinkings, and eluded a cobra that came up a Calcutta toilet. The stories he told about these things were really unbelievable—I thought he was completely full of crap until he showed me his scrapbook of news clippings about his various adventures. He didn’t show it to me to be boastful, although he had a healthy ego and was not a falsely modest saint kind of guy. He showed it to me to prove he wasn’t full of crap and to get me to buy into his wacky philosophical tricks.
    Tricks like: When something inconvenient happens to you, something beyond your control, you have to try to look at it as maybe preventing something worse. This kind of washes out when facing famine, war, or epidemic disease, but it can really help with day-to-day coping. In my life, there seems to be no completely reliable law but Murphy’s—whatever can go wrong will—and the idea that what goes wrong might in fact prevent something far more terrible is more reassuring than that old morose “things could be worse” digestive.
    The first time Phil told me this little trick, he had just fixed my front door, which had jammed, locking me inside and making me late for a very important business meeting. “Robin, if you’d been able to get out sooner, you might have