Read Online The Jade Figurine by Bill Pronzini - Free Book Online

thought. She came toward me in a loose, sensual walk. “Dan, an article like this could mean a great deal to me, to my career. I . . . I’d be willing to do anything for the kind of help I need . . .”
    I stepped away from her. “You can turn off the sex, little girl. I don’t want your fair young body, at least not for something I can’t and won’t deliver in exchange. I’ll tell you again, flat out, in plain English: I won’t help you write an article on smuggling on Singapore or anywhere else in Southeast Asia, and if you try it on your own, a little girl like you, the jackals will very probably pick you apart and fight over one another doing it. Take my advice, Tina: write something nice and innocuous on Singapore as the Pearl of the South China Sea, and then go home where you belong.”
    She stared at me for a long moment, her small jaw trembling, her gray eyes flashing with emotion, and then she turned and fled the room through a doorway beyond the settee. I stood by the louvered doors, and I could hear her in the bedroom. I wanted to get out of there. There was no point in staying, no point in facing her again. I had said what had to be said, and it was up to her from here on in; nothing else I could do or say would matter much.
    I walked to the door and let myself out and walked down to the street. The night was cooler now, and the scent of frangipani was thickly fragrant on the still air. I found a taxi after a couple of minutes and rode back to Chinatown with the rear windows rolled down to enjoy a little of the temperature drop.
    When the Tamil driver let me out, two blocks from Punyang Street, I debated walking over to the Seaman’s Bar for an Anchor Beer or two. I decided against it; I was tired, and I wanted some quiet relaxation for the balance of the evening. So I walked home through the conglomerate of night shoppers and strolling street vendors, beggars and clown-painted whores, little brown boys with trays of shoe polish crying, “Soo sine! Soo sine! Hey, ten sen, Joe, looky here!”
    I reached my building and climbed the stairs and went down the hallway to my door. The feeling of wrongness settled coldly and immediately on the back of my neck when I put my key in the lock and found it wouldn’t turn. That meant that the door was unlocked, and I distinctly remembered using the key on it when I’d left to see Tina Kellogg. Anger made my temples throb in sudden tempo, and I pushed the latch handle down and kicked the door open, hanging back, half-turned so that I could either go through the door or up against the hallway wall.
    The lights were on inside and I had company, all right.
    Just one visitor, as far as I could see, but that one was too damned many.
    Jorge Van Rijk.

Chapter Eight
    H E WAS SITTING on a batik-covered rattan chair, smoking one of his English cigarettes and wearing his gingerbread-boy smile. His suit was the color of cultured pearls this time around, and he had substituted a blue-silk ascot for the tie he had worn the previous day; he looked painfully out of place among the shabby possessions of a man he undoubtedly considered to be one of Singapore’s profanus vulgus .
    I stayed where I was, outside the doorway, and looked the room over. It seemed otherwise empty. Van Rijk said, “I’m quite alone, Mr. Connell. You needn’t fear.” He spread his arms in a relaxed, corroborating gesture.
    I took a couple of steps forward, cautiously, poised. Nothing happened. I decided he was telling the truth, but I left the door open just the same. “How did you get in here?”
    “The locks in these Chinatown tenements are flimsy at best,” he answered and shrugged. He tapped his cigarette out daintily in the shell ashtray on an adjacent table; light from the overhead bulb reflected brightly off the jade lion’s head ring on his little finger. “I have damaged nothing, I assure you.”
    “You’ve got a lot of balls after what happened last night. Or don’t your boys confess