Free The Curse by Harold Robbins Page B

woman.” I gave him a smile. “Look, I’m hungry, tired, traumatized, and have a cat that’s probably shredding my couch because I haven’t gotten home to feed him dinner and I’m too humane to declaw him even though he’s keeping me in the poorhouse buying furniture. Can we wrap this up soon?”
    â€œI’m moving on it as fast as I can. A woman is dead. We have to cover all the bases.”
    From the looks of him it was going to take a while.
    His belly hanging over his belt with a shirt spreading apart where one button was missing, sports jacket too tight and so far out of fashion the polyester finish would have been a fashion statement on a stud, slacks wrinkled and faded at the knees, shoes scuffed—he looked like a guy who life had left behind and who couldn’t run fast enough to catch up.
    He also needed to cut the hair in his nose and ears. And lose some weight.
    Once in a while he’d look up from a report he was reading and shake his head a little, causing his jowls to jiggle.
    I was ready to reach across the table and grab the papers and find out what the hell he found so interesting.
    The body was still warm, literally, so the police bureaucracy couldn’t have produced much paperwork. I got the impression that he thought if he kept me here long enough, I’d confess to something out of sheer boredom.
    I considered it just to get the hell away from him, but I didn’t know what crime to confess to.
    Failing to stop a suicide?
    Was that a crime?
    I wasn’t trying to be insensitive, but at the moment I was more concerned about the money in my pocket that my hand kept brushing to feel the reassuring bulge. So far he hadn’t searched me, but the night was still young.
    A uniformed subway cop had called the poor woman a “splatterer,” but I guess that wasn’t being insensitive, either. Millions of people ride the subway every day and a few of them end up accidentally (or on purpose) falling, tripping, jumping, or being pushed in front of the oncoming trains.
    One of the terrible truths I’d learned in my thirty-something years was that people commit suicide because sometimes life is worse than death for them.
    The woman had been out of it, maybe even tired of living. She might have just wanted to lay down and die but some thought spinning in her head about a curse was keeping her body moving.
    Suicide had been the first thought from the cops who talked to me and other witnesses at the scene. But after giving the uniformed cops a statement, I had been shuffled to this detective whose nose and ears needed a haircut.
    While he read at a snail’s pace, I tried to occupy my tired mind with the view I had through a grimy plate glass window to a large room with government-issued gray steel desks that had probably been requisitioned back before my parents were born.
    Cops of all size, color, sex, and race were at desks talking on phones or talking to each other—no one seemed to be reading anything, just talking, no one except the cop who had me trapped as though he had a foot holding down my tail.
    â€œVery strange,” he said, jiggling his jowls.
    â€œWhat is strange?”
    â€œA woman you don’t know tries to stab you this morning and then hours later starts talking to you about a subject you didn’t understand or couldn’t hear. One moment this woman is talking to you, the next she’s flying off the platform in front of a train.”
    I sucked in a breath and bit my lower lip to keep my sanity intact and then attempted to express myself without totally antagonizing him and thereby delaying my exit and jeopardizing the money in my pocket.
    â€œI don’t know that I’d call it strange in a city with eight million people. You hear about people every day that are so devastated by life or drugs that they end up street crazy. You must deal with them every day.”
    â€œActually, I was referring to the