Poor Butterfly by Stuart M. Kaminsky Read Free Book Online

I like to cook. Look.”
    She opened the Woman’s Day to a page with a folded corner.
    “There are these great recipes for inexpensive cuts of meat,” she said with enthusiasm, holding up a spread with six black-and-white pictures of plates of food. “Breaded fried tripe. Liver loaves. Brains in croustades. Heart patties.”
    “Let’s get a cup of coffee and a carrot sandwich someplace,” I suggested.
    She looked at me differently now. “My father’s fifty-two,” she said.
    “How old’s your husband?”
    “Don’t have one.”
    “Boyfriend?” I asked.
    She shook her head no, but the no was not emphatic.
    “Martin has taken me out to dinner twice,” she said.
    “The tenor.”
    “Yes,” she said. “But I don’t think it’s … and he has a wife in New York.”
    “How about that carrot sandwich?”
    She nodded and smiled, a smile like the full moon.
    It was a great moment. It would have been nice to hold onto it for a few seconds longer, but the scream ended it—a scream that seemed to cut through a dream, like the sound that wakes you from a deep sleep, a sound you’re not quite sure is in the room or in your imagination. I looked at Vera. Her eyes had gone wide. She’d heard it, too.
    I got up and went out the door. Vera came after me.
    I needed another scream to know which way to turn. It came. From my right. I went after it. Vera was doing a good job of keeping up with me. There wasn’t much light, and workmen had set up shadowed booby traps—piles of brick, boards, planks, tools—for us to trip over. Another scream guided us.
    We hit the mezzanine corridor, which had no light but did catch some of the sun from the lobby. No more screams, but someone was running, shoes clapping on marble, heading up stairs, sobbing. When I reached the stairway with Vera a few steps behind, Lorna Bartholomew plowed into me, clutching her throat. I staggered backward. Vera caught us. We all went down. A white ball of fur scuttled across the floor and landed on my face.
    “He … he …” Lorna gulped, looking back over her shoulder in the direction of the lobby.
    I got to my knees, pushed Miguelito off my face, and helped her up. The shoulder pads in her suit had shifted. She looked like Joan Crawford doing Quasimodo. I reached over to help Vera, but she was up before us. Lundeen and another man came thundering along the mezzanine lobby behind us.
    “He … he …” Lorna tried again.
    “What’s she laughing at?” the man with Lundeen asked.
    “She’s not laughing,” said Vera. “She’s frightened.”
    Vera moved past me to put an arm around Lorna’s misplaced shoulders. Miguelito was yapping at her feet. Vera reached down, picked up the dog, and handed him to Lorna, who buried her face in his white fur.
    “Are you all right?” Lundeen asked. He was panting. He looked worse than Lorna.
    “… tried to … He grabbed, put something around my neck,” Lorna said, touching her neck with her fingers. Her neck looked bruised, marked with purple, yellow, and red. “I think Miguelito bit him.”
    “Something’s there, all right,” volunteered the old man with Lundeen.
    “Where?” cried Lorna, looking around in fear.
    “Round your neck,” said the man. “Red mark. Snakelike.”
    I looked at the helpful old man. He was thin, with a mane of white hair over a surprised, chinless Slim Summerville pale face. Under his faded overalls he wore a reasonably clean white shirt and a yellow tie. He moved in close to examine Lorna’s neck.
    “Nasty, nasty,” he said, shaking his head. “Saw things like that in the war against Villa. Mexes’d come up on us at night from behind like and take this wire around a neck and …”
    “Raymond,” Lundeen warned, trying to catch his breath.
    “… like a salami,” Raymond trailed off.
    “Get her some water,” Lundeen ordered. “Get me some water.”
    Lorna was hyperventilating now.
    “Make sense,” Raymond snorted, shaking his head. “Water’s not turned