Read Online The Godwulf Manuscript by Robert B. Parker - Free Book Online

up and have a go at shaking some information out of him. Maybe later. Maybe he'd stew a little and I could call on him again. I didn't even know he knew anything. But talking to him, I could feel him holding back. I could even feel that he liked knowing something and not telling. It added color to the romance of his conspiracy. Out in the street the air was cold and it tasted clean after the mentholated smoke and the stale air of Tabor's room. A truck backfired and up on Mass Avenue a bus ground under way in low gear.
    My next try was the campus. The student newspaper was located in the basement of the library. On the blond oak door cut into the cinder block of the basement corridor an inventive person had lettered NEWS in black ink.
    Inside, the room was long and narrow. L-shaped black metal desks with white Formica tops were sloppily lined up along the long wall on the left. A hand-lettered sign made from half a manila folder instructed the staff to label all photographs with name, date, and location. The room was empty except for a black woman in a red paisley dashiki and matching turban. She was fat but not flabby, hard fat we used to call it when I was a kid, and the dashiki billowed around her body like a drop cloth on the sofa when the living room's going to be painted. A plastic name plate on her desk said FEATURE EDITOR .
    She said, "Can I help you?"
    Her voice was not cordial. No one seemed to be mistaking me for a member of the academic community.
    I said, "I hope so."
    I gave her a card.
    "I'm working on a case, and I'm looking for information. Can I ask you for some?"
    "You surely can," she said. "All the news that's fit to print, that's us."
    "Okay, you know there's a manuscript been stolen."
    "Yep."
    "I have some reason to believe that a radical student organization, SCACE, is involved in the theft."
    "Uh huh."
    "What I'm looking for are faculty connections with SCACE. What can you tell me?"
    "Why you want to know about faculty connections?"
    "I have reason to believe that a faculty member was involved in the theft."
    "I have reason to believe that information is a two-way go, sweetie," she said. "Ah is a member ob de press, baby. Information is mah business."
    I liked her. She was old for a student, maybe twenty-eight. And she was tough.
    "Fair enough," I said. "If you'll drop the Stepin Fetchit act, I'll tell you what I can. In trade?"
    "Right on, brother," she said.
    "Two things. One, what's your name?"
    "Iris Milford."
    "Two, do you know Terry Orchard?"
    She nodded.
    "Then you know she's a SCACE member. You also may know she's been arrested for murder."
    She nodded again.
    "I think the manuscript theft and the murder are connected."
    I told her about Terry, and the murder, and Terry's memory of the phone call.
    "Someone set her up," I said. "If someone wanted her out of the way they'd just have killed her. They wanted to kill Powell. They wouldn't go to the trouble and take the risk just to frame her. And they wanted to kill Powell in such a way as to keep people from digging into it. And it looked good-a couple of freaky kids living in what my aunt used to call sin. On drugs, long-haired, barefooted, radical, and on a bad trip, one shoots the other and tells some weird hallucinogenic story about guys in trench coats. The Hearst papers would have them part of an international sex club by the second day's story."
    "How come you're messing it up, then? If it's so good. How come you don't believe it?"
    "I talked to her right after it happened. She's not that good a liar."
    "Why ain't it a trip? Maybe she really thinks she's telling you true. You ever been on a trip?"
    "No. You?"
    "Baby, I'm fat, black, widowed, pushing thirty, and got four kids. I don't need no additional problems. But she could think it happened. Got any better reason for thinking she's not guilty?"
    "I like her."
    "All right," she said. "That's cool."
    "So, what do you know?"
    "Not a hell of a lot. The kid Powell was a jerk, sulky, foolish.