Murder at Ebbets Field by Troy Soos Read Free Book Online Page B

instead of a scythe, he carried a rolled-up newspaper. And on his long thin nose he wore steel-rimmed spectacles that magnified his sunken gray eyes. He was an inch or two shorter than me and many pounds lighter. Recognition twinkled in the back of my brain. This was no apparition. I knew this person from somewhere.
    Exhibiting a sudden sign of life, he stuck out a bony hand. “Hello, Mickey.”
    The sniffy voice pinned down his identity. “Karl Landfors. I’ll be damned.” I grasped his hand and found it wasn’t a pleasant thing to touch. “Uh ... come in.”
    He removed his derby and stepped in. “Thank you.”
    Then there was an awkward silence. We’d lost touch with each other, and I wasn’t sure who was responsible for the break. I tried to remember when I’d last seen him. I knew it had to be less than two years ago, but so much had happened—and Landfors’s sparse brown hair had receded so much more—that it seemed longer.
    I offered a seat.
    “No. I’m fine, thank you.” A reasonable answer since he could see that the couch was covered with clothes. And My Chair had a forbidding look that warned, “No one sits here but my master.”
    “Interesting apartment,” he observed. “Different.” He said “different” in a way that came out as “dreadful.” My apartment suddenly felt smaller with two grown men in it and not quite so nice.
    “Let me, uh ...” I started scooping up clothes. “In case you change your mind.” I hustled the bundle into the bedroom and threw it on the bed. Stepping back into the sitting room, I closed the bedroom door behind me. “Well, how about some coffee?” I offered.
    “Coffee. Yes, I could use coffee, thank you.”
    I went into the kitchen. “With cream, if you have it,” he called after me.
    I knew I didn’t have any. I opened the ice box anyway to appear as if I was making an effort. It contained just three bottles of ginger ale. “Sorry, all out,” I reported.
    “Oh. Well, black then, I suppose.”
    There was enough in the pot for one cup, if I included the dregs. I did, emptying the pot into my other coffee mug. No steam came from it. I dipped a finger in—tepid, at best. I must have dozed off longer than I thought. Well, it would have to be good enough for Landfors. It was too hot to start another fire.
    As I brought him the mug, I asked, “You still working for the Press?”
    “Oh yes.”
    “I thought you might have left after your book came out.” Landfors, a muckraking reporter for the New York Press, had published Savagery in the Sweatshop, a volume that was supposed to expose sweatshops the way The Jungle had revealed the horrors of the meat packing industry. “I bought a copy.”
    “So you’re the one. What did you think of it?”
    “It was ... uh ... different.” I’d only gotten through the first three chapters. Karl Landfors was no Upton Sinclair.
    Landfors availed himself of the cleared couch. I set the coffee in front of him, then settled into my chair. He took a sip and his face curdled. When it recovered, he asked, “Did you see today’s paper?” I guess we’d finished catching up on the last two years and were now onto today’s news.
    “No...” Uh-oh. Was Florence Hampton already a newspaper story? If she was, I hoped I wasn’t in it.
    “Here.” Unrolling the paper, he handed it over to me. “Hot off the press.”
    It was an EXTRA edition of the New York Press. A banner headline screamed

    Germany Invades France, Declares War on Russia.

    This explained Landfors’s dazed look—it was the sort of thing that interested him. I wasn’t sure what it had to do with me, though. I knew war was awful, but it was too remote for me to feel affected by it. “Well... it looks like there’s a war starting,” I said, summing up my grasp of the situation.
    “Page three,” he grunted. “Top left.” His conversational skills hadn’t improved any in the past two years.
    I flipped to page three. And there it was.

    Florence