Read Online There was an Old Woman by Howard Engel - Free Book Online Page B

bright, you know. Not just another pretty face. I think they’re well suited. I hear thatMcStu’s a wonderful cook. That wife of his was never at home long enough to cook a meal. But that’s talking out of school.”
    Armed with my introduction to the work of McKenzie Stewart, I wandered towards my office by way of the farmers’ market. What it was about a few dusty baskets of beets and apples, a few links of smoked sausages and blocks of Cheddar cheese, I’ll never know, but they gave me a feeling that the ozone layer isn’t as cracked as it’s reputed to be, that the earth still has a corner or two where the sod can’t be traced back to the Love Canal. Maybe I’m living in a fool’s paradise, but that’s the feeling the market gives me.
    On my way up James Street, I picked up a coffee-togo at the Crystal, and carried it upstairs to the familiar sound of the running toilet mingled with that of my telephone. Naturally, the phone stopped ringing as I was in the act of lifting the receiver. Save me from triflers.
    I opened Dead Letter and the rest of the morning vanished into the streets of Stewart’s crime-ridden city, where the streets weren’t so much mean as they were ill-tempered. There wasn’t a body behind every garbage can, but he did enjoy having Dud Dickens hit over the head regularly. I wondered whether the beautiful police reporter was Cath Bracken in a clever disguise. The fact that she kept her clothes on throughout the novel while dozens of others were losing theirs supported my theory. Dud Dickens was okay: no Sam Spade, but no slouch either. He made a few deductions that could have broughta smile to the face of Sherlock Holmes. The ending caught me completely off guard. I turned the pages back to see if the crucial clue was where it was supposed to be. It was, but deftly placed where it would not scream out at the reader. It didn’t scream out at me at least. I put the book down with a feeling that I knew something of the life in the underworld of Hamilton, Ontario. And I felt that I knew the writer and his girl-friend better too. It helps to get inside the head of a client or even a near client. I now knew that the girl-friend loved fast cars and had no family and that the writer counted his money and had trouble with his drinking. Now, you couldn’t really call that taking the morning off, could you? I left the question dangling, like Susan Torres’s glasses, while I opened the second of his books.

NINE
    Feeling guilty about taking off time to read a novel, I went downstairs and bought a paper. The Beacon always brings me down to earth. The first thing I saw was that the inquest into the death of Lizzy Oldridge had concluded. Those things are usually over in a day and forgotten in two, but Lizzy’s was different. There had been two days of testimony and the verdict was announced after the weekend. Barney Reynolds had written it up, although I don’t remember seeing him in the courtroom while I was there. Barney was the true pro. He could make me believe he was there listening to every word, even when he wasn’t. He had an eye for salient details. He knew how to arrest the attention of a TV-distracted reader. Some of his conclusions packed a wallop. It came as a surprise to me that Lizzy had more than eighty thousand dollars in term deposits in her safety deposit box at the Upper Canadian Bank. That made a fair contrast with the less than ten dollars in her savings account. Another stunner was the fact that Liz had left her estate to the Guild of the Venerable Bede, the outfit that had been founded by Thurleigh Ramsden, who also just happened to be the sole executor of her will. The fact that didn’t surprise me was that itwas unlikely that any criminal charges would be laid following the jury’s verdict that the woman died of emaciation, dehydration and malnutrition primarily induced by her despondency over losing