Milk and Honey by Faye Kellerman Read Free Book Online Page B

innocent—”
    “Oh, give me a break, Pete,” Marge said. “Fess up. Was he your illicit lover or something when all you men were dogged out in the combat zone?”
    Decker laughed. “No.”
    “What are you going to do for him? Bribe the judge? Burn the files?”
    Decker sat down at his desk and peeled another cigarette. “I’m going to find the man who raped and cut up the hooker.”
    “You already bailed the guilty party out of jail, my friend.”
    “Well, I don’t think so.”
    Marge leaned back in her chair, shook her head. “A seasoned guy like yourself, falling for his shit…Let me look into it. At least I’m objective.”
    “Nope,” Decker said. “I’ve got my eyes wide open, Marge. I can handle it.”
    “Sure you can.”
    Decker rubbed his eyes and said, “We can keep bickering like this, honey, or I can do something productive like go home and get some sleep.”
    “Pete!” Marge said. “You called me honey !”
    “That’s ’cause you’re acting like a broad, Margie.”
    Marge grinned. “No, Decker, you’re acting like a civilian.”
    Decker said, “I’m going home. Beep me if something comes up with Sally. I’m going down to Hollywood Division tonight and review the case files. Try to get a handle on this hooker. You can call me there if anything comes up.”
    Marge leaned back in her chair. “Colonel Dunn says that the attachments he made with his war buddies ran deeper than blood. That true with you?”
    “Nope.”
    “Yeah, Colonel Dunn has been known to spout a lot of shit.”
    Decker smiled.
    “You didn’t get together with any of your buddies when you came back to civilian life?” Marge asked.
    “Only once,” Decker said. “Somewhere between the second and third hour, after we rehashed all the old nightmares, I discovered I didn’t have a thing in common with any of them.”
    “And that was it?”
    “That was it. You know, Margie, I worked damn hard at putting it all behind me. And it’s especially hard because America has had a sudden change of heart and decided we weren’t all baby-killers. Nam vets have become the darlings of Hollywood. Indochina has great box-office appeal—all those shirtless sweaty bodies crawling through the jungle. Leeches! Gooks! Grunts going nuts! Makes for exotic drama. And the producers? They’re former hippies who now drive Mercedes instead of VW bugs. They want totalk to us, make nice. Except I remember how they treated me when I came back to the world. It don’t wash, babe.”
    “Colonel Dunn was once asked to be a consultant on a Nam film.”
    “What did your dad do?”
    Marge blushed.
    Decker said, “That bad?”
    “Let’s put it this way. The screenplay was long, and Mom didn’t have to buy toilet paper for a month.”
    Decker burst into laughter.
    Marge asked, “So who’s this guy who you’re going the distance for?”
    “Abel Atwater,” Decker said. “A hillbilly boy from the Blue Ridge Mountains of Kentucky.” Decker’s voice had taken on a nasal twang. “One of eleven chillun. His father could barely read and write, his mother was completely illiterate. Abel learned to read by sifting through mail-order catalogs. He used to entertain us by reciting Sears, Roebuck copy. Bright guy. The war messed him up.”
    “A lot of rape-os are intelligent.”
    “He doesn’t fit the profile. He’s not manipulative, he’s got great impulse control. He’s not the kind of person who goes around beating up hookers.”
    Marge didn’t answer him.
    Decker said, “All right. If I’d be brutally honest with myself, I’d say there was an off-chance that he freaked and did it. But we were in combat together for a while. I never saw him explode. Abel had a rep for being coolheaded. Type of guy the COs chose for pointman—lead-off guy in foot patrol—because he was careful and didn’t panic when things got hot.”
    “Ever see him kill anybody?”
    “You saw smoke, you busted some caps. Simple as that. When everything cooled