Read Online You Don't Love This Man by Dan Deweese - Free Book Online

all?”
    â€œOh, there are prints all over the girl’s side of the counter,” he said. “But I’m willing to bet those belong to her, so we’ll have no problem tying her to the scene. The fella who visited, though, remains at this point what we call anecdotal.”
    â€œThat’s disappointing,” I said.
    â€œBut not unusual. The largest part of planning a crime is planning covering up the crime. Smart guys cover up before, during, and after. Look at this door.”
    I bent to examine the glass, and saw in the dusted surface a tremendous number of egg-shaped reticulations, the whorls and lines of which interrupted or overlapped each other, or broke off as if they had reached some unseen border. A horror movie I’d seen as a boy came to mind, in which a mound of cockroaches had scurried wildly across and over one another’s backs in a flesh-eating frenzy.
    â€œIt’s good glass and there are plenty of prints,” he said. “But do you think someone careful enough not to touch the counter would use his hands to open the glass door? And these prints are smaller and lower, probably women’s. But look at this.” He pointed to a spot higher on the door, where I could just make out a faint crescent in the dust. “Stand next to the door, but don’t touch, please. You see how it’s just below your shoulder? Someone roughly your height leaned into this door and pushed it open with his shoulder. Did you open this door with your shoulder when you got here?”
    â€œNo. I used my foot.”
    â€œBecause you didn’t want to leave any prints, either. Smart man. Good manager. And of course neither did I when I came in. We were being careful, just like this guy was being careful.” He smiled. “We could rob a bank together someday, you and I. And if we invited the fella who visited earlier, we could all work as a team.”
    â€œWe would just need to choose the right bank,” I said.
    â€œOh, I think we should rob this one,” he said, laughing. “It’s pretty easy.”
    He seemed content to have shown me that there was nothing to see. I turned toward Catherine, who was at her desk, speaking to someone on her cell phone. She caught my eye and shook her head contemptuously while waving at her monitor, which I understood to mean the computer had still produced no images. “It hasn’t been that long, really,” she was saying into the phone. “I’m sure it will all get cleared up soon.”
    Charlotte, Tina, and Officer O’Brien weren’t visible, but I could hear their voices in my office. Were they all in there with Amber? It seemed an odd place for people to congregate. Martinez paced a solitary circle a few yards off, hunched at the shoulders and speaking loudly in police jargon to no one. There was a microphone of some kind threaded into the lapel of his uniform, I assumed, though deranged people on the street argue with their invisible tormentors from the same posture. It seemed likely that at least some of Martinez’s discussion was about our branch, but he spoke in an impenetrable code. At one point I heard him say the word niner , which struck me as ridiculous, and then I overheard something that made me pause.
    â€œNo, he’s here,” Catherine said into her phone, gazing impassively at me. “Absolutely, as soon as I can. You don’t have to worry about that at all, Sandra. I’ll talk to you soon.” She closed her phone and set it on her desk.
    Occasionally one stumbles upon a conspiracy of hidden forces that, working in concert, have concealed some essential fact of life. Deducing the world-market-level fraud regarding Santa Claus is an early instance, but one must also stumble upon the truth about sex, or discover that adults lie, you can’t actually be whatever you want, crime pays, a tacitly condoned and perpetuated class system rules the population, love is a