No Cure for Death by Max Allan Collins Read Free Book Online Page A

reminded me of the day a couple months back when our conservative, near-elderly dean was showing a bunch of guys from the North Central accrediting board around the school, and when they went into Jack’s office, he was wearing a Hamm’s Beer sweat shirt and smoking a cigar, his feet on his desk. The dean blew what of his lid was left after many such confrontations with Jack, but the North Central boys said nothing, sensing the rapport Jack had built with the two young men he was in the process of counseling.
    Jack is five-eight, and near as wide as he is tall, though he isn’t fat. He’s chunky, and he’s got a paunch, but he isn’t fat. His age is indeterminate: he could be forty, he could be fifty. He looks more like a truck driver than a Dean of Admissions of a college, and he’s black.
    Jack was a token black who backfired profoundly on his employers. Besides championing liberal causes and pushing his own and other minorities’ down the throats of an unwilling school board, Jack didn’t play by the unspoken rules. For instance, there was the case of the woman he was living with—a white woman. She had an apartment downtown over one of Port City’s many taverns, and unofficial word came from the school board that the Dean of Admissions shouldn’t be seen coming in and out of the apartment of such a woman (“such” being a euphemism for “white,” one supposes). Jack said, well, fine, then he’d be glad to marry the gal and make it legal. No further criticism of the Dean of Admissions’s love life was heard.
    I watched as he hung up the phone. He spotted me waiting and grinned and waved me in.
    “You got a minute, Jack?”
    “Sure, Mallory, sure.” He gestured to the chair opposite his desk. He didn’t have his Hamm’s shirt on this time, just an off-white sport shirt.
    I sat down. “Been going a few rounds with the superintendent?”
    “Naturally.” He offered me a cigarette and I declined while he lit one up. “From major issues to minor. Like, he thinks the Ag boys should be excused from the Humanities, but I think they need a history course, not just history of the plow, and a literature course, not just ‘How to Read a Harvester Manual.’ And then there’s that black kid from Moline he wants expelled, just because the kid called his gym instructor a mother.”
    I laughed. “Sounds like a term of endearment to me.”
    He shook his head, smiled. Slapped his desk. “Well, what can I do for you, Mallory? You don’t need
counseling,
for Christ’s sake.”
    “I need some information. And it’s nothing to do with school.”
    “What is it, then?”
    It was something like the hundredth time I’d gone through the story, but if it seemed stale to me, it didn’t to Jack: he leaned forward, intense interest on his walnut-stained face.
    When I finished, Jack leaned back and said, “So what now? What’re you going to do? Investigate? You’re no detective.”
    “I know that. But all I’m going to do is ask some questions, do a little research. If I can come up with anything really concrete, I’ll turn it over to Brennan.”
    “Why not leave it to him
now?
”
    “I didn’t think you thought much of Brennan, Jack.”
    “I don’t. But in the context of this town, he’s a pretty good man. Port City’s sheriff has to be a little lazy and a little corrupt if he’s going to be an accurate reflection of his town. But when the need arises, Brennan pulls himself up to it.”
    I nodded. “Well, then, you can see why I’m going to have to come up with something solid, something Brennan can’t ignore, if I’m to possibly get him up off his can.”
    Jack shrugged. “All well and good, but I still can’t give you my approval of what you’re up to.”
    “I don’t want your approval. Just some help. And I think you know in what way you can help me.”
    “Sure. The big black guy with one eye you tangled with.”
    “Do you know him?”
    “Maybe. I’ll go even so far as to say probably.