Free The Old Contemptibles by Martha Grimes Page B

arms hard against his chest.
    His throat was killing him; it was as bad as the strep throat he’d had that one time. . . .
    Don’t cry. Think.
    A coffee would help. Soundlessly, he padded to the cooker, pulled down one of the boxes of Rombouts and the white Rombouts cup his mum kept beside it, and lit the gas under the kettle. He caught it up before it whistled and carefully poured it into the prepacked coffee filter, then took the works back to the table and waited for it to drip through.
    He decided his throat was not his own; it was William Smythe’s. William Smythe would have got hysterical, would have screamed and kicked the cops, just the way he did when he missed the goal at soccer. Kicked the goalie.
    William Smythe’s mother and father were exactly like William. No matter what William did, it was the school’s fault. Bricks flew out to hit William in the head; pavements flew up to flatten his nose; fists flew into his face. (Well, that was true enough.)
    And Alex’s own mother was like Alex; he was goddamned if he’d let anybody—police, anybody—put it out his mum had killed herself.
    She hadn’t; she wouldn’t. He knew this as well as he knew the outlines of the cooker, table, fridge and the cup of Rombouts he was raising to his lips.
    She simply wouldn’t do it to him.
    When he was certain that the police constable outside hadn’t heard anything and didn’t know anyone was in here, he would go upstairs again.
    It was stupid speculating, but he couldn’t stop his mind from going round and round. Would they say she’d died from an “accidental overdose”? He dismissed this immediately. She wasn’t careless. Certainly, she wasn’t “unstable,” much as the Holdsworths loved to think she was.
    That supposedly good-humored yet long-suffering sigh from Genevieve . . . “You just have such bad luck with jobs, don’t you, Jane?” His mother did not “lose” jobs. If an art gallery closed, it was hardly her fault the gallery didn’t need her anymore. If a temp sec employer tried to toss her in bed (Alex knew what the vaguely mentioned “trouble” meant), she could hardly have been blamed for leaving his employment.
    And then there was always the bit about his mum’s own small inheritance: “You’ve just run through your money, Jane, like some tout at Newmarket races. . . .”
    If there was one thing Alex knew it was how hard she tried to budget the money so that it would last, and that she’d no head for figures. If there was another thing he knew, it was Newmarket races.
    She wouldn’t take money from his great-grandfather Adam, who had tried to press something, some little stipend, on her. He was the only one of them Alex liked and trusted, the only one who didn’t somehow imply his mother was responsible for his father’s death.
    Alex couldn’t think about his father. Not now.
    Oh, fuck them.
    He shoved the cold coffee away with one hand; his other went to the tissue-wrapped revolver in his jacket pocket. Taking the box from the bedside table had been a kind of reflex action; he hadn’t known why he’d done it.
    Yes, he did. He might need it.
    His mum hadn’t died of “natural causes”; there was nothing seriously wrong with her. And she hadn’t killed herself. That didn’t leave much room for speculation.

8
    Carole-anne Palutski took the call while she was doing a sausage, onion and potato fry-up in Richard Jury’s kitchen.
    The voice at the other end was hollow, one of those voices that made you think the mouth was covered in cobwebs; but it still wallowed in officialdom.
    Officialdom never impressed Carole-anne. On the contrary, it only tempted her to make clattering sounds with pans and spoons as the caller demanded to know who this was.
    “This just ’appens—happens” (she snatched the h from the linoleum along with a wilted onion ring) “to be Mr. Jury’s assistant. . . . Well, I really don’t know where he is, do I? It’s not yet eleven, so the