Cold and Pure and Very Dead by Joanne Dobson Read Free Book Online Page A

she, obviously. Write well, I mean. We haven’t released this information to the general public yet, Professor, but a long, long time ago Milly Finch was a famous novelist. She published under the name of Mildred Deakin.”

J oe Rizzo
leaned against the brick wall of Stubby’s Grill. Sara knew he was waiting for her. She had stayed too long at Cookie’s house, reluctant to emerge from its order into the chaos of her own family’s tenement flat in Satan Mills, the poor side of town. Her mother would be cleaning up the scraps of fried potato and canned beef, if Sara’s father and brothers had left any scraps, and her father would bawl at Sara the minute she entered the house to get her lazy butt into that kitchen and wash those dishes, or did she expect her mother to slave her fingers down to the bone for a great, big, lazy lout of a girl like Sara. A lot he cared about her poor mother, Sara thought, lying around and drinking as he would have been ever since he got home from the shoe factory
.
    Sara knew Joe was waiting for her because he’d been there for five nights running, leaning against that wall, his hard, lean body encased in tight blue jeans and a white undershirt, a pack of Lucky Strike cigarettes stashed in the rolled-up sleeve, his black motorcycle parked slantwise in front of the bar. Joe was what the girls at school called a “rock,” or a “hood,” the kind of boy who’d left school at sixteen to go to work at Phillips’s garage. He was a good mechanic, everyone said so, a hard worker, but every time Sara looked into his face with its hard lean lines and hard black eyes she saw a hard future, a future that she already knew far too well
.
    Sara Todd understood herself to be an incipient sinner. But it was not the sin of bedding Joe Rizzo that she was likely to commit. It was the sin of refusing to lie in the bed that Satan Mills had made for her, the transgression
of insisting on a far more dignified life than the likes of Joe Rizzo would ever offer her, the immorality of choosing to leave the rank into which she had been born
.
    Lowering her eyes to the cracked sidewalk, she passed Joe, pretending she didn’t hear his greeting, without once looking up at him
.

6
    T he New York cops had just finished grilling me about my interview with Marty Katz, and I was watching their green Ford Taurus pull out of the Dickinson Hall lot when Piotrowski materialized at my side on the marble steps. He must have been lurking around the corner of the square brick building waiting for Syverson and Williams to leave. The sight of his plain, broad face with its brown eyes and Slavic cheekbones somehow reassured me that, in spite of the irrational irruption of murderous violence into my life once again, God might still be in His Heaven and all might still be right with the world. Piotrowski had that effect on people; it was one of the things that made him a good homicide cop.
    The weather was glorious, sunny, and so clear that from my position on the wide steps, I could glimpse the outline of the distant Berkshires between the Gothic stone of the college library and the sleek concrete modernity of the Wakefield Dining Commons. In the informality of first-day classes, groups of students and teachers sat cross-legged on the grass under the ancient maples of the campus quad. I raised an automatic hand in greeting to Earlene Johnson, the Enfield Dean of Students, who flashed me a knowing smile when she noted my companion, then hurried on by, but I felt extraordinarily detached from campus life. The New York investigators’news had stunned me with its implications, making the cause of Marty Katz’s death all too apparent to me. If I hadn’t so flippantly tossed off the title of Mildred Deakin’s book in response to his question, the reporter would still be alive. Admittedly it was a stupid question he’d asked, but he didn’t deserve to
die
for it. I’d asked a great many stupid questions myself over the years—after