Natural Suspect (2001) by Phillip Margolin Read Free Book Online Page B

decided that he had better go back to his apartment in Little Italy and get on some winter clothes if he didn't want to freeze to death. Somehow, with Hightower Sr. in the news and on his mind, this fate didn't seem as far-fetched as it normally might.
    But before he went investigating, he had to get some food inside him. He hadn't eaten since lunch at Murray's, so he stopped in at the pizza place a block from home and ordered a ground beef and cheese calzone. "And, hey, Luigi, you want to throw in some tomatoes and lettuce and onion and maybe a pickle and some ketchup?"
    "On a sesame seed bun yet?" Luigi spun his dough in the air, slapped it down on the marble counter, and barked his familiar laugh. "You want, Patrick, I could just make you up a cheeseburger?"
    Patrick shook his head. "No, thanks, Luigi. You go to an Italian place, you don't order American. You know what I'm saying? Besides, I had a cheeseburger for lunch. I'm trying to get out of the routine."
    "Yeah, sure," Luigi deadpanned. "Well, this ought to do it. You're breakin' new ground here."
    Finally, well fed and bundled against the storm, Patrick saw his cab arrive at the entrance to the Sweeney a little after nine o'clock. The hotel, halfway uptown on the West Side, had been recently refurbished, and now seemed to be a relatively friendly place with almost a neighborhood atmosphere. The cab wouldn't turn up the short street to th e e ntrance because it hadn't been plowed, so Patrick walked to where he could see a small bar off the lobby. He stopped for a moment, outside in the swirling snow, taking the measure of the patrons. He knew the reputation of the place and guessed that there were some, maybe many, arrangements beyond those that seemed obvious.
    That man in the window holding hands over the tiny table with the much younger woman. The two guys at the bar, locked in a muted conversation, apparently unaware of the television or, indeed, anything else besides each other. The matron and, perhaps, her son.
    When it was built back in the twenties, the Sweeney had been a female-only dormitory. Midwestern girls with little or no connections would get to the big city and need an inexpensive and safe place from which to begin their forays into the Big Apple. Naturally, then, the Sweeney had been a mecca for hordes of young men. As times changed and the hotel's fortunes and clientele waxed and waned, it never lost its cachet as a place of secret assignation. Now, in its current incarnation, charming and all spruced up, it attracted clandestine couples from throughout the five boroughs and--if Henry's sighting of Arthur Hightower proved accurate--even millionaires from Long Island.
    It was far too cold a night to stand around outside for long. Patrick soon found himself inside, shaking off the snow, hanging his overcoat from a peg by the door. At the bar's entrance, he stopped and let his eyes adjust. The place was smaller and even more crowded than it had looked from the outside. In fact, he didn't see an empty seat.
    What he did see, however, was even better.
    He took a breath and moved forward between the tiny tables, the undistractable couples, to the end of the bar that had not been visible from outside. One man sat alone under the television set, staring forlornly out over the action. He was in his mid-fifties, handsome, with a full head of graying hair. He listlessly twirled a glass that must have earlier held a Manhattan--a cherry stem on his napkin gave it away.
    Patrick didn't want to lose his nerve by thinking about what he was doing. This was a break, fate, call it what you would, and he had to act. "Excuse me," he said to the man as he sidled up to the bar, "but aren't you Joe Kellogg?"
    The man slowly turned his head, looked Patrick up and down, lifted his nearly empty glass, and slurped at the dregs. His voice, when it came, was a deep Southern-edged baritone of honey, smoke, and good whiskey. "That's the name, son. But you've got the advantage of