Dead Midnight by Marcia Muller Read Free Book Online Page B

low, and the unit emitted little chirps while I spoke. Not that the conversations were long. The friends of Roger I had yet to contact were either out of the office or on another line, and would have to get back to me about scheduling an appointment. When I checked with my own office for messages, Ted sounded out of sorts. Hy had called from Bangkok, he said. Otherwise there was nothing of importance.
    Bangkok. Hy had flown there on Monday to train operatives of Renshaw and Kessell International, the corporate security firm in which he held a one-third interest, in hostage-negotiation techniques. I wrestled with time zones, the International Date Line, and quickly gave up.
    “What time is it there?” I asked Ted.
    “How the hell should I know?”
    “Well, when did he call?”
    “About two hours ago. Hold on.”
    I heard his swivel chair squeak, and then there was a thump and a curse. “Are you okay?” I asked.
    “I am if you discount the fact that the stack of phone books just fell on my foot because
someone
piled them too high.”
    “Not me.”
    “For a change.” In the pause that followed, pages riffled. “Yeah, here it is. International calling section. Bangkok’s plus fifteen hours.”
    “That can’t be right. It’s to the west. Plus is to the east.”
    “Bangkok’s halfway around the world, more or less. It’s also east of here.”
    “But if I were flying, I’d go west.”
    “But you
could
fly east.”
    “Oh. I guess it works that way with everyplace.”
    “Unless it’s north and south. Or northeast and southwest, or—”
    The conversation was making my head ache. “Enough! Fifteen plus, huh?” It was twelve-twenty; that made it three-twenty in the morning in Thailand. Too late to return the call, unless it was urgent. “What did he say?”
    “Who?”
    “Hy!”
    “Oh, him. He wanted to know if you got the rose.”
    “Of course I did.” A single rose—dark red, almost black, was delivered to my office every Tuesday morning; Hy had been sending them since a few days after we met, although the color had changed as the relationship deepened. “Why would he ask?”
    “Maybe it’s some kind of secret code.” Ted liked Hy, but he tended to become sarcastic about his line of work. He disapproved of it and of him having enticed me into becoming a pilot—both too dangerous, in his opinion.
    “Well, if you crack it, let me know,” I said, and ended the call.
    I looked longingly at my phone. Very late or not, I would have liked to talk with Hy. But my next appointment, with Margaret Nagasawa, was scheduled for one-thirty, allowing me little time to drive back to the city, park at the Sutter-Stockton garage, and walk over to the offices of Carefree Days Publishing on Tillman Place.
    Tillman Place is one of the old-fashioned little lanes that abound in the city, a few blocks from the northeast corner of Union Square. Walking along on its cobblestones, I felt as if I had been transported back to the days of the Barbary Coast, when San Francisco was a wide-open town filled with miners down from the Mother Lode, seamen off ships out of faraway ports, and gamblers and con men and ladies of the night eager to fleece them of their hard-earned cash.
    In college I’d made forays from Berkeley to the city and discovered a restaurant at the lane’s end—the Temple Bar, a small, dark place where regulars rolled dice for drinks and society ladies stopped in for trysts after a hard day’s shopping at I. Magnin. Magnin’s is long gone now, its space absorbed into Macy’s, and so is the Temple Bar. Gone also is the small bookshop that used to draw many a reader down the lane, but Margaret Nagasawa’s publishing firm was housed in the building a couple of doors down from the shop’s former quarters—proving that progress had not yet robbed Tillman Place of things literary.
    Carefree Days’ top-floor suite of offices was spacious and filled with light, even on this gloomy day. Brightly colored posters