Blood Music by Jessie Prichard Hunter Read Free Book Online Page A

“You’re not trying to hurt the lady, I know that. I think you feel for her. But if you want to know something, why don’t you just ask me?”
    The voice was every male authority figure, loved and feared, that John had ever known, but he would not succumb. He said, “I’m sorry, Sergeant, but I can’t tell you. I have a good reason for wanting to talk to her, and you’re right, I’d never hurt her. She’s been hurt—” and his voice betrayed him, and he was crying, and he hung up the phone.
    He sat at his desk for fifteen minutes and then he went down the hall to Circulation to tell Mary Ellen that he was going home for the day. He’d say he didn’t feel well, and if anybody asked, would she tell them?
    Mary Ellen was bent over a copy of the Post. When she looked up and saw him her eyes were gleaming. “You hear about the latest—oh, I’m sorry.” In most people’s minds there was a tragic best-seller romance in being the relative of someone who had died so horribly, and John knew he was not tragically romantic. His pain was like Cheryl’s latent beauty: if you didn’t care you wouldn’t see it.
    â€œIt’s okay,” he said. “I’m going home. It made me sick. I wish I could find out her name. I want to talk to her. I think it would do me good to talk to her.” John didn’t know why he was telling this to Mary Ellen. It could be dangerous later, if he ever did what he had to do.
    Mary Ellen’s embarrassment was forgotten. “But the paper already printed her name,” she said eagerly. “In the Metro edition. Didn’t you hear? It was on the radio. They originally printed it but they got a lot of flack from the police and the girl’s family, so they printed a Metro Extra edition. They never did that before. So only about eighty thousand copies got out with the name in them.”
    Suddenly John’s heart was pounding. He didn’t think he could breathe.
    â€œNo, I didn’t know,” he said. “Do you have that edition?”
    â€œNo, I don’t get up that early. I think it’s terrible they printed her name at all, don’t you?” But John had gone.
    He went to the newsstand in the lobby of his office building but they only had the Metro Extra edition.
    â€œExcuse me, but do you have any copies left of this morning’s Metro edition?” he asked the Middle Eastern man behind the counter.
    â€œWe have only what you see. All others are sold.”
    There was an Eastern Newsstand in Grand Central, where John used to buy the French and Italian editions of Vogue for Cheryl. (“I like to see how much too fat I am for Italy,” she’d say; Cheryl was very slim but like every woman she thought she was fat.) What if Mary Ellen were wrong and it wasn’t called the Metro edition? He knew about the Late City, that was the last one. There was a Sports edition maybe, or was that the Daily News ? Did they have any more copies of the first edition? The Metro edition?
    â€œWe sold out of that this morning.”
    There was another Eastern Newsstand at the other side of the building. “We don’t have any more of that edition. You like later edition maybe.”
    There were two newsstands on the first floor. “Only what you see there.” “We have no more of that.” They sold magazines and newspapers in the Barnes & Noble in the tunnel next to the subway. There was no Post at all. “I don’t know, if it’s not out we don’t have it.”
    â€œAre you sure?” Every place he went, “Are you sure?” Because maybe they weren’t sure, maybe they just didn’t want to bother and the name was there, behind the counter, carelessly folded, discarded in a corner, with a ring from a coffee cup obscuring the name of the only person who could help him.
    There was a newsstand at the corner of Forty-Second and