Death Penalty by William J. Coughlin Read Free Book Online Page A

sixty-five cents for the pop.”
    â€œNice of you. What about my legal advice?”
    â€œHey, I can get that free in any bar in town. There’s always a drunken lawyer or two around who wants to show off. On the other hand, the soda pop has value.”
    â€œPut it on my tab.”
    He grinned, showing the missing teeth. “What the hell, I’m a softy. We’ll call it even.”
    I left. It wasn’t the first sixty-five-cent fee I had earned. Sometimes my advice went for even less.
    Out in the boatyard I detected the faint odor of burnt wood, an aftereffect of the explosion. It mixed in well with all the other aromas.
    I saw a man working with a sander on a hull of an old boat that sat on wooden supports. I presumed he was Snodgrass. I waved, but his concentration was total and he didn’t see me.
    He was making a kind of love with that sander, not sexual, nothing like that, more the kind of love that Michelangelo might have put into that famous ceiling. Every brushstroke a caress.
    I wondered what Snodgrass would do for the object of his love. From the look of satisfied rapture, probably anything.
    For some reason, I felt more lonely than before.
    BACK AT MY APARTMENT the little red light on my answering machine was blinking. Each blink in the series represented a recorded call and message. Any voice, even a recorded one, was welcome in my present mood.
    I filled a Manhattan glass with ice and diet ginger ale. It looked like the real thing and I sipped it as if it were. Then I sat down by the phone and pushed the button to summon the genie of the tape.
    The first call was my insurance man reminding me that a premium would be due in a few days and asking me to come in to reconstruct my insurance package. Fat chance. He had already talked me into more coverage than I could ever need.
    The second call was from Mrs. Emily Proder. Mrs. Proder had stipped in the local supermarket and fractured her wrist. It was the most exciting thing that had happened to her in her seventy years. I was suing the store on her behalf, and I had carefully explained it might be months, perhaps years before we got a settlement or judgment. That had been a week ago. She called every day. If she missed me at the office she called my apartment. She was one of the reasons I was considering getting an unlisted number again. A hungry lawyer looks for every advantage to bring in business, a listed phone is one. A successful attorney always makes sure his home number is unlisted. I was slowly becoming successful again, so I was rethinking the telephone situation.
    The third recorded message was different.
    â€œMr. Sloan, my name is Rebecca Harris. You know me, I think. I’m a waitress at the Pickeral Point Inn. I go by the name of Becky there.” She had paused. Her voice sounded strained, not an uncommon thing for people who need to call lawyers after business hours.
    â€œI need to see you,” she continued. She gave the phone number. I jotted it down on the pad I kept by the phone.
    All the waitresses at the inn tended to look alike. Harry Sims, the manager who did the hiring there, liked older blondes, women who had once been beauties and who, while still pretty, had the tested look of old cars, worn some but carefully maintained. The attitude of the inn’s waitresses, apparently by policy, was friendly but not familiar, at least that was the attitude I saw on the rare occasions I went there to eat.
    I tried to conjure up a Becky.
    I thought I knew which one she was. If I was correct, Becky was a tall woman who, while trim, had a sturdy look to her, the kind for whom toting a heavy tray isn’t much of a chore. The one I was thinking of seemed tough and wore her blond hair pulled back into a stylish ponytail.
    Like most ex-drunks I have a soft spot for waitresses. For most of us, they, along with bartenders, constituted the major social contact of our lives, a kind of extended family. Waitresses dealt with