Free A City Called July by Howard Engel Page B

just groping for an example you understand, maybe Larry Geller wasn’t in this all by himself. Maybe we should be looking for two people. That’s at least a different tack from the cops. And it might even pay off.”
    “I see. Some sort of confederate.”
    “That was just an example.” Ruth interrupted our little talk, drawing Debbie away from me, and I watched the sisters talking across the room.
    I could see that Debbie still didn’t trust me, and I guess she had good reason not to. I was more dangerous to them in the long run than the mob had been. At the very least I was out to catch up to the father of the two kids I’d just seen shunted off to a safe haven. Any help I could be to my clients wouldn’t help the Gellers at all. The best thing for them to do would be to sell up and get out of Grantham as fast as possible. Whenever the law caught up with Geller there was going to be more publicity and more newspaper headlines.
    “I’m sorry for your trouble,” I said without thinking. I don’t know where it came from, it just came. It was probably something I picked up from Frank Bushmill whose office is across the hall from mine. Frank would have the tact for a session like this if he were sober, which was seldom.
    Downtown an hour later, I ran into himself at the door to his consulting room. Frank is a chiropodist on his sign and a podiatrist in the phone book. Podiatrist is the metric term, I guess.
    “Hello, Benny. You look like you’ve seen Hamlet’s father. Have a look at your face in the mirror. You’ll swear it’s made of Irish linen.” He dragged me into the small toilet at the top of the stairs and made me face my face in the glass. He was right, I could read the tension of the last hour in my mouth and eyes, although, with Frank standing beside me, I couldn’t be dead sure the tension wasn’t something he generated. I was never fully relaxed with Frank around. It was well-known around town that Frank had an unhealthy appetite for strange flesh. I always had to be on guard in case it was mine.
    “I just came back from a mob scene outside the Geller place.”
    “Jayzus! The print’s not dry on the paper, and they’re out there like that, eh? Fat lot of hooligans! Hangin’s too good for them. Trying to get them out of the kip, were they now?” Frank was sounding more Irish than usual. He must have been reading that Flann O’Brien fellow again. Frank was always at me to read this or that, and it seemed that every second book that he waved under my nose was by this Flann O’Brien. I managed to read some of the books he lent me, but I couldn’t make head or tail of the O’Brien ones. Frank had taken it into his head that I needed more education. Maybe for a chiropodist with a bent appetite I was ignorant, but when I finished at the collegiate I felt I had more education than I could manage. In none of my cases so far had I been able to put E=mc 2 to any account. “Come into the office and we’ll have a quiet jar together. I’ve got an hour before my next patient. You can tell me all about it.” He led the way to his door then through it into the office smelling of chemicals barely covering the odour of troubled feet. A bottle with his own name on it was produced and in a moment we were both holding and clinking glasses. Frankly, I wanted to talk to somebody about the case. The drink I didn’t need. I never do.
    “Frank, I feel like I’m in a room without windows or doors. The walls are like polished granite, like on tombstones, and there aren’t even inscriptions to get a finger-hold in.”
    “This Geller business! Families,” he muttered. “They close ranks to the world. But I’d like to hear what they’re after saying among themselves. I warrant that would bear hearing. I gather they’ve made themselves into clams whenever you showed up?”
    “Sure. And now that the story’s public property, it’ll be hard to see them on anything but television from now on.” I took a sip