Free The Bitch by Gil Brewer Page A

fortune.” And in a little while they would return, all smiling, and bulging with lucre and satisfaction and pay you back your dollar, and maybe rob you of your bank account—nicely, but winningly, all the same. Because they were the on the hill of success, or something. They knew how to climb.
    Only that wasn’t me.
    So where did I fit? And the warm, unpleasant rain of remembering the detective agency, and what it stood for; the calm, unhurried days of a steady job, the growing respect of those about me—it came to me, that way. I knew that I could this moment be seated behind that table in the anteroom at that god-damned soft-drink plant, keeping a weather eye on the bastardly two hundred thousand dollars, drinking the thoughts of it, but not doing anything about it.
    And there you are, too. I had done something about it.
    “What’s so funny?” Sam said.
    I quit laughing.
    He turned the car up Central Avenue, away from the bay. The yellow taxi-cabs were lined and clotted and waiting like a herd of impatient, sleepy animals, around the Greyhound bus station as we came by. The rain was mist now, misting down upon the sleeping city.
    “How do you feel now, Tate?”
    “How am I supposed to feel, according to your righteous book?”
    “All right,” he said.
    He turned off Central, and drew up at the side entrance of the building that housed our office.
    “Get out, Tate.”
    I got out and he slid across the seat and stepped out behind me. The mist of rain sifted down out of the pink-tinged, cloudy sky, and the air smelled fresh and clean and damp.
    • • •
    “Somebody’s in the office,” I said.
    The lights were lit and I saw the shadow of a man against the frosted glass of the hall door.
    “Yeah.” Sam turned to me. In the hall you could smell the cold marble floors, the stale, not unpleasant odor of years of hustle-and-bustle and office routine. “Whoever it is,” he said, “let me do the talking.”
    I looked at him.
    “I’m the only one who knows you did it, so far,” Sam said, and then he opened the door. Lieutenant George Schroeder glanced around at us. Lieutenant Schroeder from Homicide.
    It was all I could do to follow Sam inside. He had said nobody knew….

CHAPTER 9
    Lieutenant Schroeder was a medium-sized, stocky, case-hardened piece of murder machinery. Set in motion, he couldn’t be stopped short of annihilation, and plenty of men had tried that and failed. Schroeder snapped around as we entered the office. He wore a transparent plastic raincoat over a dark suit, no hat, his red-tinged hair fighting on top of his skull like very thin slivers of electric-charged wire. His pale blue eyes were bleak and very alert.
    “It’s damned well time you got here, Morgan!” he said to Sam. “You think I’ve got all night? Do you? I’ve got to get moving on this thing!”
    Sam nodded and closed the door behind me and I heard him flick the latch. He was taking no chances, either. I began to sweat. I couldn’t understand what he’d said in the hall—I couldn’t get it through my head. Yet, if the police were after me by name, Schroeder would have shown plenty of interest. As it was, he didn’t even look at me for a moment.
    Sam said, “There was something I had to do.” He glanced toward me. “I thought I was supposed to meet you over at headquarters, Lieutenant.”
    Schroeder smiled quickly and sarcastically. “Then what are you doing here, Sam?” he said softly.
    “Had something to pick up.”
    “Well, let’s get to it!”
    Schroeder left the waiting room and spun through the doorway into the inner office, the door banging back against the wall. He already had the lights turned on.
    “How did you get in?” Sam said.
    Schroeder laughed harshly.
    “How well did you know this Hornell?” Schroeder said.
    “Well enough. I thought.”
    “You thought.”
    I went over to my desk and laid my hand on the top, and it was cold and damp like everything else—like my insides. But it felt