Mallets Aforethought by Sarah Graves Read Free Book Online Page A

mystery, he meant, of how someone got Hector through an eighty-year-old wall. It had been my big question, too.
    Or one of them. He looked at me some more. “So what was the news
you
got, that you were crying about not long before I got here?”
    Wham, out of left field. But not entirely; the news could’ve been George confessing to me that he’d done the deed.
    So I leveled with Colgate again. “A friend of mine in New York was a fugitive from the Federal authorities for a long time. He got picked up a few days ago, they’ve got him over a barrel.”
    Friend
was putting it mildly. If not for Jemmy Wechsler I might have ended up with a bullet in my own head, all those years ago when I was little more than a child and alone in the city.
    “And you knew where he was? This friend of yours?” Colgate asked.
    In other words, did I need an attorney, too?
    “No. But he was . . . probably I shouldn’t say this, but he was a hero of mine. And now he’s either going to prison or into the witness protection program.”
    Witless protection, Jemmy always called it, because you had to be witless to get in a position where you needed it. And even more so to believe in it; I mean, that it could protect you.
    Or that anything really could. “He was a mob guy,” I said. “Handled their money. Few years ago, he stole a big bunch of it and disappeared.”
    Colgate whistled. “Nervy move. And you were a pal?”
    “Yeah.” It was Jemmy who’d taught me to survive and thrive in Manhattan. Now he was in trouble and I didn’t know whether to be sad, scared, or furious with him for letting it happen.
    All of the above, I figured. “Anyway, that was the news,” I said to Colgate. “Nothing to do with this.”
    We headed for the door. “What did you mean about no locked-room mystery?” I asked. “And what’s in that plastic bag?”
    He held the big old ornately paneled door for me, scraped it shut behind us over the uneven wooden floor as we left the house.
    “Body goes in, there’s got to be a way in,” he said. “That, like the man says, is elementary.”
    I put the key in the lock and jiggled it, waiting for the tumblers to fall. A good hard kick would have pushed the old door right over, or someone could’ve broken a sidelight window and reached through to turn the dead-bolt knob.
    But no windows were broken and the door hadn’t been kicked. I handed Colgate the key when I was finished with it; everyone on the historical society’s volunteer team had one.
    As did George. “Same with a gun,” Colgate added. “Gotta be a way out for it, too.”
    I wondered if someone took the gun eighty years ago when Eva Thane was shot in the head, or later when Hector was put here.
    “And I don’t know if you noticed,” Colgate continued, “but there was an old carpet on that floor.”
    Right, an ancient red rectangle, its vaguely Oriental design mostly obscured by dust. I’d barely paid any attention to it. Now Colgate strode to the squad car ahead of me through sodden autumn leaves torn down by the storm.
    I stood still, working it out. He was already on the radio, reciting his unit number, location, and situation.
    “A trapdoor? Is there a trapdoor under that rug?”
    He glanced over, nodded to confirm. Which encouraged me; if he thought I was screwing around with him he wouldn’t have told me anything.
    Waiting for him to finish, I leaned against the squad car. As the storm pulled off, the wind had swung around out of the south, bringing with it a burst of warmth and a false smell of spring mingled with a hint of wood smoke. Crows cawed, blue sky peeped between the departing clouds, and shafts of sunlight beamed down onto the puddles shimmering in the streets.
    Maybe everything would be all right, I thought.
    Colgate hung up his radio, came around to me. “Found this in Gosling’s pocket.”
    He held up the plastic bag. The paper inside had been torn from a lined notebook, the kind you could buy anywhere, marked with a