Jade in Aries by Donald E. Westlake Read Free Book Online

childhood by organized religion. After fifteen years surrounded by nuns, of course the rest of us look queer to him. Do you have influence anywhere on the force?”
    “None.”
    “A pity,” he said, and pursed his lips. He had shrugged his coat off his shoulders so that it hung backward now over the top of the chair, and he was sitting with his feet planted solidly on the floor, feet and knees spread wide apart as though he were prepared for the hospital to veer suddenly into heavy seas. Tucking his hands back into his side jacket pockets, he leaned against the back of the chair, and said, “That’s what we need, you know. Someone from on high to sit with a great weight upon Manzoni’s head. I’m doing all the expected legal waltz moves, but with the court calendars around this town, it takes six months to get permission to leave the room. By then, Manzoni can have our unfortunate friend committed, castrated, lobotomized and deported.”
    There was a question I had to ask, and there was no sense trying to find a roundabout diplomatic way to ask it, so I simply stated it direct: “Do you think it might help to bring in another lawyer?”
    He closed one eye, glittered the other one at me, and smiled like the Cheshire Cat. “Someone’s told you I sleep with boys,” he said.
    “That’s part of it,” I said.
    “Happily,” he said, “Detective Second Grade Aldo Manzoni may represent the Rheingold drinkers of our fair city, but once you get much above the level of the lip-readers, you’ll find a fair degree of tolerance around and about. I expect I can do an attorney’s job approximately as well as most heterosexual members of the Bar.”
    “I didn’t mean that,” I said. “I don’t know what your regular field is—”
    “The world is my regular field,” he announced. He was prepared to be stern with me. We might both be working on the same task, but only one of us was going to be boss. “My practice has been varied,” he said, and then winked broadly.
    I was finding him tiresome. I said, “Cornell is satisfied anyway, and that’s the main thing.”
    “Ronald’s safety is the main thing,” he corrected me. “And now, if we’re finished studying my role in all this, would you mind terribly explaining yours? I had hoped Ronnie was presenting you as a man with some sort of clout on the police force.”
    Suddenly my job here seemed ridiculous. I described it in a monotone: “Cornell thinks his partner, Dearborn, was killed—”
    “Dear Jamie. A loss. You never knew him, you’ll have to take my word for it.”
    “Yes. Cornell thinks he was killed by someone he knew, some member of your circle. He was doing some investigating.”
    “Yes, he told me,” Remington said. “And I found it very intriguing. Solving a murder astrologically. Has anyone ever done it before?”
    “I wouldn’t know,” I said.
    Cornell said, “Stew is interested, too. In astrology.”
    “More critically, perhaps, than some of the others in our little circle,” Remington said, “but I do find it fascinating. And in this instance, of course, ultimately dangerous.”
    I said, “You don’t doubt it was the same man who tried to kill Cornell.”
    “Not for a moment. Unfortunately, I am Remington and not Manzoni. Unfortunate in this instance only, I hasten to add.”
    “Cornell asked me to take over his investigation. If I turn up the guilty party, there won’t be any more question of committing Cornell as an attempted suicide.”
    “Roundabout,” Remington commented. “Be simpler to offer Manzoni a bribe, if he were bribable. Do you think he is?”
    Cornell said, weakly, “I’m sure he isn’t. I’m sure he wouldn’t take a million dollars to lose the pleasure of doing me dirty.”
    Remington nodded judiciously. “My own estimate, exactly. But you yourself have been a policeman, have you not?”
    “I have,” I said. I wondered what he knew about me. I hoped it was no more than what he’d just said.
    “When