Free Box Nine by Jack O'Connell

to move for the coffee urn. Zarelli and Lehmann mumble to one another with disgusted looks on their faces.
    Lenore pushes back from the table. Woo approaches her and says, “Detective,” and pauses.
    â€œPoor short-term memory,” she says. “Maybe you should get your hands on some Lingo.”
    â€œPerhaps,” he says, again trying to flash her the killer smile.
    â€œThomas,” she says, “Detective Thomas.”
    â€œDetective Thomas,” he says, “of course. I was wondering if possibly we could meet a little later. For lunch, possibly. To discuss the investigation.”

Chapter Five
    I n her tiny office, Eva applies the last, slightest brushstroke of blush onto her cheek. She looks quickly at the smudged mirror, then closes the small black plastic case and slides it into her pocketbook inside the bottom drawer of her desk. She raises her hand to brush at her cheek and stops herself, thinking, Leave well enough alone. She doesn’t like the idea that anyone might notice that she wears makeup, but without it she thinks she has the face of a corpse, cold as ice, white as a sheet.
    She can tell already that it’s going to be a beaut of a day. The Reader’s Digests are in and she’s got two carriers out sick. She’s already called for a couple of floats from down the main branch, but nobody’s promising anything. She’ll handle it. If she has to, she’ll call Gumm and ask him to forget about taking today off. And he’ll give.
    She pulls her middle drawer open and takes out her eleven-inch clipboard and several preprinted forms which she inserts under the clip. Then she folds all the forms over the top of the board to reveal a blank yellow legal pad. She takes a just-sharpened pencil from her cup and holds it above the pad. She breathes slowly and quiets her whole body, lifts her head, and remains completely still, listening.
    Eva’s office, which had once been a storage closet, borders the locker room. Eva takes notes on everything that is said in the locker room. The conversations are always the most banal, boring exchanges, but she notes them anyway. She thinks that it’s a general rule of life that no information is so small that it can’t, at some point, maybe in the far future, be put to good use. So she keeps this private record in her files at home, an ongoing transcription of the locker room small talk, the complaining and swearing and taunting. Poor Ike Thomas, the bruising he takes.
    Eva smuggles her legal pad of shorthand notes home every night, then, after a supper that’s been planned a week in advance and is a nutritionist’s dream of balance and freshness, she indulges herself. Eva’s one great treat is music and last year, after making supervisor, she went out and blew a wad on a Bang & Olufsen stereo system that she’d fantasized about for months. It cost almost ten grand and she had to take a loan from the credit union, but each evening around six-thirty, when she slides in the CD of selections from Wagner’s Götterdämmerung , which was the first piece of music she bought, she knows it was the absolutely correct decision. She sits in a corner, in a swivel secretary’s chair, and types up her notes on a heavy black Underwood manual that had belonged to her mother. At times she has to take a break and sit with her head down at her knees in an anti-faint position. She thinks this is because of the incongruity caused by the banality of the words she reads in relation to the majesty and power of the music that’s entering her ears simultaneously. She always has a tall glass of orange juice next to the typewriter, ready to revive her, put her back on course.
    Eva read a biography of Wagner when she was an adolescent and for a time, during the heat of her mid-teen years, he was her fantasy lover, the guy she dreamed about at 4 A.M., bathed in a thick sweat.
    Last week she dreamed about Ike Thomas.