Harmony In Flesh and Black by Nicholas Kilmer Read Free Book Online

not, what Smykal had decided to do with Clayton’s money was stick it up his nose; the absence of a stash was suggestive, like the absence of the money itself.
    â€œThey’ll find cocaine in him. If we’re lucky, the story’s going to be cocaine,” Fred said. “A drug buy or bust or rip-off. It’s how they’ll have to read it.”
    Even if the man had had not a friend in the world, and even if his neighbors had hated him, his body and its immediate circumstances were going to be, very soon, in the public domain. The cops soon would know too much about Smykal.
    Fred had done what he could without making things worse. The letter was a lost cause.
    He took the back way out and watched the street, sitting in his car in the dusk before dawn, before he drove away.

5
    To Molly’s question, mumbled sleepily as she made a place for him in the bed, Fred answered only, “No, I didn’t get it.” He had showered and slipped in beside her, not wanting to alarm her. He did not want to lay his worry on her unless events made it unavoidable, mostly because he was reluctant to bring an ugly murder to her bed. He’d seen worse things than Smykal, living or dead. Having done what he could, he put it away until he had to take it on again.
    Clayton he’d called right away, from a pay phone after he left Smykal’s, waking him up to tell him, Do not mention Smykal to anyone, for any reason, until we talk. Don’t telephone his number. We’ve got trouble. He had not decided how much he could say to Clayton, but he was determined to get the painting out of Molly’s house this morning. That would mean driving into town.
    So Fred was drinking coffee in Molly’s kitchen when she came in, and looking at the painting Clay had got them into, which was propped against the oven.
    â€œSorry,” Fred said. “My Saturday is screwed. I’ve got to spend time with that little lady.”
    â€œIt’s hard to imagine what that poor girl will find to do in Clayton’s house, hanging around in her birthday suit,” Molly said.
    This was not really fair. Clay had been a widower since long before Fred first met him and they started working together; and he remained a devoted husband to his wife’s memory. She, a Stillton, from one of the Boston families whose names and wealth are coextensive with the towns on the North Shore, still gazed in moist rapture from a silver frame in Clayton’s study. But nothing in Clayton’s manner, nor his social interests, now distinguished him as one for whom an intimate relationship with another human, female or male, was possible. That was a closed chapter for him, something he had done and finished with.
    On the rare occasions when he made a reference to his past history—speaking with Fred perhaps on a late evening when both were tired from some project—Clay would suggest the vestiges of a truly bewildered confusion, as if, in marriage, he had awakened in bed one morning surrounded by large, damp clockwork.
    But when Clayton ran his hands with tenderness along the contour of a frame or laughed over the juxtapositions of forms and colors in a painted image, Fred thought he saw the man who had had the capacity to court, and marry, and stand by a young wife while the cruel surprise of a wasting illness carried her off.
    You had to work at it to see it now, though, and you couldn’t always summon the patience. Molly, perhaps on Fred’s behalf, had far less patience with Clay’s foibles and mannerisms. But Fred suspected that Molly, being a direct sort, was imagining herself in the position of this naked, unnamed model, hanging around in Clayton’s house while he failed to remember that manners are a flimsy substitute for conversation and the rough give-and-take of affection.
    Fred had been staring at Clay’s new picture for a half hour. Looking at it now, he figured there might be fifteen Americans