Free The Touch of Treason by Sol Stein

the two cans in the garage. The labels on them are two inches high, kerosene and gasoline. What I think is somebody mixed some of the gas in with the kerosene in Mr. Fuller’s heater. Murder isn’t a federal offense. It’s a nice local crime. I want to see those three brains upstairs again.” To Widmer, “You’re not their lawyer, too, are you?”
    “No,” Widmer said.
    Perry stepped forward. “Mr. Cooper, maybe I can get someone from Washington to talk to you on the phone before this goes any further.”
    “I don’t care if you get J. Edgar Hoover’s ghost on the telephone. This is my jurisdiction. Let’s go upstairs and find out who put the gas in the kerosene.”

CHAPTER SIX
    W hen his private line rang, Thomassy knew it was Francine.
    “Where are you?” he said.
    “Your place.”
    Before Francine Widmer he’d given no woman the key to his house. You let a woman feel at home in your house and the next thing she’s running around the perimeter peeing, marking off her turf. He wasn’t about to give anyone an exclusive on his life.
    “I’ll need a key in case you’re late,” she’d said, and he’d taken his duplicate off the peg and handed it to her. That was safer than telling her there was a duplicate under the edge of the third flagstone outside. The peg key he could always ask for back when it was over.
    Was that what he was expecting, that this, like the smoke over an extinguished fire, would eventually drift away, as the others had? If she has your key, he told himself, your privacy is shot. You can’t ask for that key back; it’s a terminal message. You want her to keep coming. But when he’d asked her, on the spur of one glorious moment, if she’d like to move more of her things in, maybe give up her apartment, it was she who’d said no thanks to the only gift he’d kept for himself.
    Her voice, those resonant chords within her gracefully long neck that caused, as now, an answering vibration he would prefer to control, said ever so casually, “I want you to do something for me.
    The women before Francine were all askers. They’d never have said There’s something I’d like you to do for me. The authority in her voice, something he’d always thought of as a masculine attribute, had attracted him. Judge Turnbell had said to him in chambers, “Thomassy, you’re the only lawyer I’ve had out there whose voice doesn’t have a whisper of subservience.” Turnbell was black. He’d learned all about role playing long before he’d got his law degree. “Weak people,” Turnbell had said, “reek with deference. Deference shows a deficiency of respect. They like to be surrounded by niggers and women. Who are you afraid of, Thomassy?”
    “What would you like me to do for you?” Thomassy said to Francine.
    “Remember that bar of glycerine soap you brought home from San Francisco?”
    “Rain.”
    “Blue soap that smelled of rain. I found one in a pharmacy on Forty-eighth Street today. I’d like you to come home and lather my back when I shower.”
    “Your back?”
    “My legs too if you like.”
    “You can reach your legs.”
    “Not as well as you reach them. Come home.”
    *
    He drove a bit faster than usual. The streets were slick. A slight rain had brought oil out on the surface of the road. He liked his silver-gray Buick Electra, a heavy car that held the road, a solid defense against any errant made-in-Japan tinbox that crossed the double yellow line in his direction. Slow down, his head told him, you’re not a kid anymore.
    *
    Before Francine he’d gone with women who’d say things like, “How about if we went to the movies tonight and had dinner at my place afterward?” That was okay, he preferred that to having them in his place, where they’d be tempted to get domestic and try to show him they belonged. In their places he could watch their ploys with a certain detachment. Joanne, who overdid the candlelight business; candles on the table, okay, but on the sideboard