Read Online The Search for the Dice Man by Luke Rhinehart - Free Book Online Page B

radicals raid the TV station he could never prove anything. Had to go afterhim for breaking FCC regulations. Putt was on the case for seven months officially and two years after that on his own – after Rhinehart jumped bail.’
    ‘Did he find any leads?’
    ‘Not so you’d notice,’ said Cooper. ‘He got pretty closed-mouth about it after a while, though. A little nuts, you know? He told me once just before he left the force that he prayed every night that God would give the man what he deserved. “What’s that?” I asked. “Castration and dismemberment,” says Putt.’ Detective Cooper laughed.
    ‘Do you have any idea how I might locate this Mr Putt?’ I pressed again, irritably.
    ‘Sure,’ said Cooper. ‘Try the FBI. Putt got his law degree and joined the bureau. He likes to wear suits.’
    I couldn’t decide whether to pursue the Putt lead into the FBI or not. It seemed a little silly to go and ask them where Luke was when just two weeks before they had come to me with the same question. Instead I decided to see what I could find out from the
World Star.
    Kurt Lyman was a ton of fun. He received me in his office at the
World Star
with a hearty handshake and a big grin. He was a small wiry man whose conviviality seemed inconsistent with his slight build. His office was a mess and throughout our talk a chunky secretary kept scurrying in and out, scavenging for papers or notes either on the desk or in a file cabinet, but ignoring Lyman and me as if we were custodial help.
    ‘So you’re the guy’s son, huh?’ asked Lyman after he had motioned me to a chair still slightly buried in papers and had himself sprawled back in the tipback chair behind his desk. ‘He must be raking in millions, right?’
    ‘I wouldn’t know,’ I answered irritably. ‘I haven’t seen him in years and need to locate him.’
    ‘Hey, if I had a daddy who was worshipped by thousands of assholes with money I’d want to find him too.’
    I did a wondrous job of not showing active displeasure.
    ‘You indicated in your article that no one seemed to know for sure where this Luke Rhinehart was,’ I went on. ‘Do you have any ideas about where I might look for my father or how I might find him? I assume you have a lot of material that you didn’t include in your article.’
    ‘Hey, I never even went to the place,’ Lyman countered easily. ‘The whole article is based on this girl who came to us. Even the photo of the church comes from some Polaroid she took when she was there.’
    ‘Did she say she’d ever met this Luke Rhinehart?’
    ‘Met your father?’ echoed Lyman, grinning. ‘No, she says she met some people who claimed they had seen him in the commune – one girl even claimed the Big Dice Daddy fucked her in the orgy room – but our source herself never saw him.’
    ‘Why didn’t your paper send someone to the commune to dig up some more juicy stuff?’
    ‘Funny you should ask,’ said Lyman, poking at his nose with the eraser end of a pencil. ‘Griggs wanted to go for it but seems the girl couldn’t tell east from west or Paris from Pittsburgh. She says a girlfriend drove her there through a lot of back-country roads someplace down in Virginia or North Carolina or Kentucky. We spent about half an hour over some road maps with her and we might as well have been throwing darts. We couldn’t narrow it down any better than a big circle of more than a hundred and fifty miles’ diameter. Turns out she was asleep or stoned most of the way.’
    ‘She doesn’t sound like too reliable a source.’
    ‘Reliable source!’ snorted Lyman with a grin. ‘Christ, compared to some of our sources she was integrity incarnate. She was simple, sincere and spacey. Everything in that article of mine is the God’s truth by the standards of the
World Star
.’
    ‘So the commune exists and people say that my father is there,’ I suggested, looking at Lyman sceptically.
    ‘Yep.’
    ‘Is there a chance I can talk to the