Savages: A Nameless Detective Novel (Nameless Detective Novels) by Bill Pronzini Read Free Book Online

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chants over a cemetery grave. That’s been known to cure all sorts of illnesses.”
    I stared at her. “You’re kidding, right?”
    “Not at all,” she said, and her mouth twitched and she burst out laughing. God, it was good to hear her laugh again. “You should see the look on your face.”
    “. . . Had me going there for a second.”
    She put the book down and gave me a long look that I couldn’t quite read. But her eyes were soft. “Another thing I’ve been doing today is thinking,” she said.
    “About what?”
    “That I haven’t been much good to you the past few months.”
    “You’re always good to me. And good for me.”
    “You know what I mean.”
    “No, I don’t.”
    “Sex,” she said.
    “Hey, where did that come from? That’s not important right now.”
    “You’re a man, aren’t you?”
    “A sixty-two-year-old man. At my age—”
    “Oh, don’t give me that age nonsense. You’re as horny as you ever were. So am I, in spirit. I haven’t lost interest any more than you have.”
    “Sure, but under the circumstances . . .”
    “The circumstances. I’m tired of letting ‘the circumstances’ rule our lives. Admit it—you want us to be the way we were as much as I do.”
    “Of course I do, but—”
    “And that means making love again.”
    “Kerry . . . why are we having this conversation?”
    “Why do you think we’re having it?”
    “The timing isn’t right. . . .”
    “No, not quite. But pretty soon. If I’m well enough to go back to work week after next, I’m well enough to start having a love life again.”
    She had that look she gets when she’s made up her mind about something. The look she’d had all through the surgery and radiation therapy. Very determined woman, Kerry. She accuses me of being stubborn sometimes, but she can be just as hardheaded.
    “I don’t know,” I said. “You don’t want to do anything that might—”
    “Might what? Give us both some pleasure?”
    “I mean . . . what would Dr. Janek say?”
    “I don’t discuss my sex life with my oncologist, for heaven’s sake.”
    “Uh . . . the radiation burn . . .”
    “We’ll be careful.”
    “Still, the contact, the pressure, close like that . . .”
    “Resourceful, aren’t we? We’ll think of something when the time comes.”
    The conversation was making me uncomfortable. By way of changing the subject, I went out to the kitchen for a bottle of Anchor Steam. When I came back, Kerry had picked up
The Magic Island
, but she wasn’t reading—she was eyeing the gift box again over the top of the book.
    “Okay,” she said. “What’s in the box?”
    “An investigation I let myself get talked into today.”
    “You’re investigating a box?”
    “For starters, yes. Whether or not it goes any further depends on what I find in there—and what Tamara finds on some computer discs that I off-loaded to her.”
    “Sounds exciting.”
    “My kind of case, these days.”
    I explained about Celeste Ogden’s hatred and distrust of her brother-in-law, and her suspicion that her sister’s death wasn’t accidental, and what she’d hinted I would find among Nancy Mathias’s personal effects.
    “She may be right about Mathias,” Kerry said. “When a woman feels that strongly and intuitively about a person, there’s usually some basis for it.”
    “Maybe. Unless she’s as monomaniacal as she claims Mathias is.”
    “Well, why don’t we have a look in the box?”
    “We?”
    “There might be something a woman would pick up on that a man wouldn’t. Did Tamara go through the contents?”
    “No. I figured the discs were enough of a burden. I’d’ve tackled the diary myself, but you know how I am with computers.”
    “I don’t envy her the job. Reading another person’s private diary is a kind of invasion, even if the woman is dead.”
    “And pawing through the rest of her effects isn’t?”
    “Not exactly. It’s not quite the same thing.” She laid the book aside and sat