Read Online The Disposable Man by Archer Mayor - Free Book Online Page A

suggest that brighter colors make for a happier workplace. I’m not complaining about the results, though. Here we are.”
    She gestured to a door labeled “7-25J”—none of the doors had names on them—and entered without knocking, ushering me into a windowless room that to the very last detail looked stolen from an upscale hotel, with a blank computer filling in for the TV set.
    “Mr. Snowden will be with you shortly,” she said and left me alone.
    In fact, it wasn’t all that shortly. I got to familiarize myself with my fashionably bland surroundings for fifteen minutes before a side door opened and a slender man with thinning hair and dark-rimmed glasses entered, a single folder clutched to his chest like a shield. I guessed Gil Snowden to be in his mid-fifties, and my instincts told me he’d been waiting me out on the other side of the door, a notion suggested by the sole mirror in the room looking suspiciously like the one-way observation window we had back at the PD.
    The possibility didn’t predispose me to like him.
    He gave me a limp, moist handshake before officiously barricading himself behind the dark wooden desk. “Lieutenant Gunther,” he spoke in the same sleepy voice he’d used on the phone, “it was very nice of you to come down on such short notice. I hope you had a pleasant flight?”
    “I drove.”
    Snowden had been pretending to study the contents of the folder. My terse reply made him look up. “Everything go all right?”
    I tried jarring him a little. “Till I got mugged last night.”
    He smiled sympathetically. “Yes. So I heard. I am sorry. Not the best introduction to the city. I’m glad you got off lightly.”
    I was seized by the same chill I’d felt before being ambushed the night before. “How did you hear about it?” I asked. “The local cops made it sound like it was right up there with a parking ticket.”
    His smile didn’t change, but he sat back in his chair, exuding a smugness I’d missed earlier. “We have different interests from them.”
    “In me or the man who tried to knife me?”
    “Both, actually. But you’re sitting here now. I don’t know where he is.”
    “Implying you know who
he
is.”
    He waved a hand carelessly. “It doesn’t matter. What counts is that he missed.”
    I shifted my gaze to the wall behind him for a moment, rethinking my position. It was in Snowden’s interest to play up the Big Brother image, regardless of what he knew, but he obviously did know something, and that alone gave weight to some of the paranoid fantasies that had kept me awake last night.
    “Is the man we found in Vermont connected to the mugger?”
    “Possibly. Part of that depends on what you can tell me.”
    I looked at him incredulously. “What I can tell
you
? We’ve got nothing on that case. I came down here so you could tell me something.”
    Snowden shook his head and laughed softly. “Lieutenant, forgive me, but I bothered to find out a little about you. Very tenacious man—‘Like a dog with a bone,’ from what I heard. Don’t you think ‘nothing’ is understating things slightly?”
    I took my time answering, suddenly suspicious. He’d dug into my background, he knew about the incident last night, and his own people had visited Hillstrom’s lab to check out the corpse. Yet now he was pleading ignorance. It was possible he didn’t know how little we’d discovered, or that he was concerned we might know more than we did. More likely, we’d stumbled over something we hadn’t yet recognized. If so, nothing he’d said so far had made me want to use him as a confidant.
    I spoke slowly, hoping my genuine befuddlement would help hide the little I planned to hold back. “As far as I know, we have a dead floater with no identifiers. We don’t have a single lead—nothing. We put feelers out everywhere—you know that—but we’ve gotten nothing back. That’s why your phone call was so interesting. You did say you’d help me put this case to