Free Further Adventures of Carlotta Carlyle by Linda Barnes Page B

conversationalists. The Red Sox and the weather usually covers it. Talking to Mooney was so much fun, I wouldn’t even consider dating him. Lots of guys are good at sex, but conversation—now there’s an art form.
    Mooney, all six-foot-four, 240 linebacker pounds of him, gave me the glad eye when I waltzed in. He hasn’t given up trying. Keeps telling me he talks even better in bed.
    â€œNice hat,” was all he said, his big fingers pecking at the typewriter keys.
    I took it off and shook out my hair. I wear an old slouch cap when I drive to keep people from saying the inevitable. One jerk even misquoted Yeats at me: “Only God, my dear, could love you for yourself alone and not your long red hair.” Since I’m seated when I drive, he missed the chance to ask me how the weather is up here. I’m six-one in my stocking feet and skinny enough to make every inch count twice. I’ve got a wide forehead, green eyes, and a pointy chin. If you want to be nice about my nose, you say it’s got character.
    Thirty’s still hovering in my future. It’s part of Mooney’s past.
    I told him I had a robbery to report and his dark eyes steered me to a chair. He leaned back and took a puff of one of his low-tar cigarettes. He can’t quite give ’em up, but he feels guilty as hell about ’em.
    When I got to the part about the bag in the trash, Mooney lost his sense of humor. He crushed a half-smoked butt in a crowded ashtray.
    â€œKnow why you never made it as a cop?” he said.
    â€œDidn’t brown-nose enough.”
    â€œYou got no sense of proportion! Always going after crackpot stuff!”
    â€œChrist, Mooney, aren’t you interested? Some guy heists a cab, at gunpoint, then tosses the money. Aren’t you the least bit intrigued ?”
    â€œI’m a cop, Ms. Carlyle. I’ve got to be more than intrigued. I’ve got murders, bank robberies, assaults—”
    â€œWell, excuse me. I’m just a poor citizen reporting a crime. Trying to help—”
    â€œWant to help, Carlotta? Go away.” He stared at the sheet of paper in the typewriter and lit another cigarette. “Or dig me up something on the Thayler case.”
    â€œYou working that sucker?”
    â€œWish to hell I wasn’t.”
    I could see his point. It’s tough enough trying to solve any murder, but when your victim is the Jennifer (Mrs. Justin) Thayler, wife of the famed Harvard Law prof, and the society reporters are breathing down your neck along with the usual crime-beat scribblers, you got a special kind of problem.
    â€œSo who did it?” I asked.
    Mooney put his size twelves up on his desk. “Colonel Mustard in the library with the candlestick! How the hell do I know? Some scumbag housebreaker. The lady of the house interrupted his haul. Probably didn’t mean to hit her that hard. He must have freaked when he saw all the blood, ’cause he left some of the ritziest stereo equipment this side of heaven, plus enough silverware to blind your average hophead. He snatched most of old man Thayler’s goddamn idiot artworks, collections, collectibles—whatever the hell you call ’em—which ought to set him up for the next few hundred years, if he’s smart enough to get rid of them.”
    â€œAlarm system?”
    â€œYeah, they had one. Looks like Mrs. Thayler forgot to turn it on. According to the maid, she had a habit of forgetting just about anything after a martini or three.”
    â€œThink the maid’s in on it?”
    â€œChrist, Carlotta. There you go again. No witnesses. No fingerprints. Servants asleep. Husband asleep. We’ve got word out to all the fences here and in New York that we want this guy. The pawnbrokers know the stuff’s hot. We’re checking out known art thieves and shady museums—”
    â€œWell, don’t let me keep you from your serious business,” I said,