Read Online The Hours of the Virgin by Loren D. Estleman - Free Book Online Page A

“Hundred.”
    â€œFifty.”
    She started to get up again.
    â€œJohn?” I said. “Amos Walker. Guess who’s in my office.”
    She reached out and slapped down the plunger. “Asshole,” she said again.
    I cradled the receiver. Titanic was playing downtown at 4:30, 8:00, and 11:40, if it matters.
    She counted the tens and singles I placed in front of her, unzipped a pocket over her left breast, and made the deposit. “Strangeways is her name,” she said. “Lauren Strangeways.”
    â€œAny relation to Gordon Strangeways?”
    â€œJust by marriage.”
    â€œHow do you know her?”
    â€œStrangeways owns the Tomcat. They say he likes to make surprise visits to places he owns, peek at the books to make sure he ain’t cheated. He come around last month in a limousine and the manager come out to talk to him. She was in the back. I heard Strangeways introduce her.”
    I waited until she was at the door again. “What happened to your baby?”
    â€œSomebody adopted it, I guess.”
    â€œWas it a boy or a girl?”
    â€œI don’t know. I didn’t check.”
    â€œSlither, Vyper.”
    She banged the door shut behind her. She was the only person I’d met in days who didn’t have a cure for the flu.
    I wrote the name Laurel Strangeways on the telephone pad. I don’t know why. I wasn’t likely to forget it. Her husband had a million dollars for every letter, with enough left over to buy the pad and the desk and the building that held them. I was still saving up for another pad.

8
    A freezing mist was falling on Woodward when I parked down the block from the library, glass needles shattering when they struck the asphalt and the vinyl roof of the Cutlass. I noticed a new crack in the marble when I climbed the steps to the library entrance, and about a pound and a half less pressure in the pneumatic closer when I pulled open my favorite door. The tube needed replacing. Money for such things had gone into the old mayor’s private investment firm, and the new administration was waiting for the casinos to make up the difference.
    A security guard and one of the older librarians smiled and said hello on my way to the reference section. The vagrant who was sleeping his way through Shakespeare at the first reader’s table had gotten as far as act two, scene three of Troilus and Cressida , then passed out again. I don’t know what I’d do without free public access to information. Buy a book, I suppose.
    I walked right past the customer computer terminal to the shelf containing the Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature . Ten minutes’ congress with the big red-bound books sent me off in five directions, and when I had everything stacked on one of the partitioned tables near the windows, I set out my notebook and pen and killed the rest of the morning enlarging upon my education.
    The subject of Gordon Strangeways presented a litmus test for the differing styles of the magazines and other sources. People was sly and slangy, Time dowdy and ponderous, Newsweek just dowdy. U.S. News & World Report had a serious case of hemorrhoids, The Christian Science Monitor needed a doctor. Who’s Who asked, “Who?” Only Forbes and Fortune seemed to approve; you could hear the raspy dry-washing of miserly hands over the columns of figures on the black side. At a conservative estimate he was worth two and a half billion, and making two million a day.
    There was some conflict. His age varied along with the place of his birth, and nobody seemed to be clear on whether he had served with the army or the coast guard or waited out the fall of Saigon in Quebec. The business of checking facts has tended to lag behind technology in the Age of Information.
    The Playboy interview was the most informative and plausible, an in-depth personality profile based on many hours spent in conversation with its subject, and as many more