Rainy City by Earl Emerson Page B

or sometime. Melissa did some sneaky things where her father was concerned. I remember once, she took a bunch of money out of savings and bought him a cable-knit sweater. Didn’t even ask me. A hundred bucks.”
    “You said something happened when she was a kid. What?”
    “I don’t know. She never got it clear enough in her own head to talk about.”
    “But it was something ugly?”
    “I only know about it from the nightmares she used to have. She would cry in the night and have these ferocious nightmares.”
    It was a quarter after nine when I dropped off Kathy and Burton at the county courthouse where they were to meet one of Kathy’s law professors. Brusquely, Kathy turned back to me at the half-open Ford window and said, “Be careful, Big Boy.”
    I nodded absently, my mind already light-years away.
    “Hey, Cisco?”
    Snapping out of it, I met her worried smile. “Hey, Pancho.”
    She wore a chic pantsuit. A fraction of my mind was disappointed that she had no more occasion to dress like a strumpet. In its own way, it had been interesting.
    I had a hunch. A strong hunch. I didn’t get them often, so when I did I rolled with the crazy things. I had awakened that morning with an urgent desire to speak to Mary Crowell again. I parked the truck, found a pay phone and dialed her Bellingham number. It rang twelve times before she picked up the receiver and coughed into it.
    When she was finished coughing, Mary Dawn Crowell spoke in a crisp, scholarly manner. She was so melancholy and yet so precise in her enunciation that I suspected she’d been tippling, was trying to camouflage signs of it
    “Mary? This is Thomas Black.”
    “I had an inkling it was you. I don’t know why, I just did.”
    “Yeah, the morning is rife with hunches. I think we should talk some more, Mary.”
    “Yes.” Her voice was drifting off. “Perhaps we should.” She sounded preoccupied. “I have much to reveal and I guess…I guess it’s about time I opened this particular can of worms. I’ve held suspicions for years. It’s about time somebody else heard them.”
    “Suspicions bout what, Mary?”
    “I’ll tell you in person. I don’t like speaking about these matters on the phone.”
    “What matters?”
    “When you get here, I’ll spill the whole can.”
    “I’ll be up in a couple of hours.”
    “Come after lunch. That would be better. I have a rather unpleasant errand to run this morning.”
    “After lunch, then.”
    In the Seattle Public Library, I spent an hour and a half thumbing through phone books and looking up pest companies and citizens named Romano. One pocket sagging with quarters from a bank down the block, I started making telephone calls, explaining to the bewildered Romanos who answered that I was an attorney looking for a specific Romano in the pest control business. My story was that some eccentric old widow had kicked the bucket and willed Romano her jewels out of gratitude for what he had done to her termites. It only took twenty minutes of pushing buttons and telling lies to reach a dead end. Four numbers had not answered.
    The Tacoma listings for Romano were short and sweet. Same results, with two numbers unaccounted for. Then I phoned all the pest companies in Seattle and Tacoma asking for Romano. “Romano who?” they wanted to know.
    Next, I might try Federal Way, Burien, Bellevue, Mercer Island, Puyallup. If I wanted to, I could force-feed another hundred quarters into the black box. Perhaps Romano was the guy’s first name, instead of his last. That would be a doozy. I’d never find the bow.
    Despite what she said, I had the feeling my face was the last one in the world Mary Dawn wanted in front of her that Morning. But she had something vital to tell me and the butterflies in my stomach galloped in anticipation. This case was about to break wide open. Secrets were going to spill like blood in a slaughterhouse.
    Bellingham was farther away than a schoolboy’s Christmas on that long gray