Free Blueblood by Matthew Iden

messages.
    After the last call, I put on a pair of ripped jeans and a t-shirt and got to work re-painting my kitchen. I wasn’t wasting time, I was being realistic. If you asked any of the guys I’d called, I’m sure they’d remember me fondly, but my messages wouldn’t be a top priority. Things like extortions and robberies and Presidential motorcades were a bit more pressing than my out-of-the-blue request for help. And this wasn’t something I could rush. They’d call me when they could. And if I didn’t want to give myself an ulcer wondering where Bloch’s killer was while I waited, I needed to keep busy.
    In my kitchen, I stared awhile at the pile of brushes, rollers, drop-cloths, and paint I’d picked up at the hardware store weeks ago and had successfully ignored since then. I’d never painted a wall in my life. And never would have, but while cleaning up a family-style Easter lunch, Amanda had suggested it would be good for me.
    “You need a fresh perspective, Marty,” she’d said. “It’ll give you something constructive to do with your time. Instill a more positive outlook.”
    “What it will instill in me is a backache and a profound lightness in my wallet,” I said.
    She lifted a piece of peeling wallpaper—yellow with a pattern of quaint Amish buggies—with a fingernail. “This stuff is brown in the corners. And it’s peeling at every seam. How old is it, anyway?”
    I thought about it. “It’s been here…a while.”
    “How long?”
    “Years.”
    She gave me a look. “How many years?”
    “Eighteen,” I said. I diverted my gaze to floor, ashamed. Hopefully she wouldn’t ask about the linoleum. It had been there twenty.
    “Oh my God, it has to go,” she said, pinching a curling corner of the paper and pulling away a two-by-two swath without effort. I said, “hey!” in protest, but she balled it up and threw it in the trash. “Even if it were a week old, you’d have to get rid of it. It’s screaming seventies.”
    “That’s because it is seventies.”
    She put her hands on her hips and did a half pirouette, assessing the room. “Okay, we’ll need some buckets for hot water and some scrapers to get this crap off. Come on, chop-chop.”
    Out with the old, in with the new. We managed to get the paper off by working the remainder of Easter Sunday. Not the day of rest I’d been hoping for. Scraping the glue off the wall ruined the next Saturday. The work left me exhausted, but that had been weeks ago and now I needed to make some progress or Amanda would stop talking to me. Patches of glue and wallpaper residue spotted the wall, giving the kitchen a glum, diseased look. Not the fresh, dynamic change Amanda had been looking for. But ripping stuff off a wall was easy. Painting was hard .
    My cat Pierre set up camp at the doorway to the dining room and watched while I got ready. I moved the chairs and table, wrestled the drop-cloths into place, taped the edges of the ceiling, and opened the legs of a step ladder. I mixed the primer and poured it into a plastic cup to start what a DIY magazine had called “cutting in.” I climbed the ladder, dipped the brush in the cup, and the phone rang.
    I closed my eyes briefly, came back down the ladder, and answered it. It was Bloch.
    “Singer,” he said. “I got your message.”
    “Good. I wanted to keep you up to speed. And warn you if you hear about me through the grapevine. I called in a few favors to help me run this thing down.”
    There was a staccato tapping on the other end of the line. It took me a second, then I realized it was a sped-up rendition of the pencil-tapping habit a lot of people have when they're on the phone. Bloch’s version was sent into overdrive by his need for nicotine, apparently. “That’ll make it tough to keep the investigation quiet.”
    “I need to get on the inside of these departments, Bloch. Which I can do if some of the people I called vouch for me. But I have to tell them something about why.