The Baby Blue Rip-Off by Max Allan Collins Read Free Book Online Page B

one old woman wouldn’t be any sweat.”
    “Well?”
    “Well what?”
    “She wasn’t, was she?”
    “No. She sure wasn’t.”
    We sat and looked at each other for a minute or so.
    Then I got up, and Brennan stood.
    “Thanks for talking, sheriff.”
    “It’s okay. Thanks for letting me bounce some ideas off your head.”
    “Any time.”
    “Just one thing, Mallory... don’t let it go any further than just me and you chatting, okay? You can come around and trade theories all you want, but don’t go nosing around.”
    “Wouldn’t think of it.”
    “Mallory....”
    “I said I wouldn’t think of it.”
    “Bullshit.”
    “Hey, and we been so cordial up to now.”
    “Get the hell out of here,” he said, trying to get gruff again and not quite pulling it off.
    I headed for the door, and he stopped me.
    “Say, Mallory?”
    “Yeah, Brennan?”
    He glanced at John’s picture in the gold frame.
    Then he said, “Never mind. See you around.”
    “See you around.”

10
    A big expensive Buick, last year’s model, was parked in front of my place when I got back. The Buick was dark green and smaller than a yacht, but not much. A fat man’s car. Appropriately enough, Edward Jonsen was in it. The car’s engine was running, the windows up, air conditioning going. Even so, Jonsen was hot. Psychologically, if not physically. He was making an effort to contain his anger, but like a lid on a boiling pot of water, the attempt was not entirely successful; his lower lip took on a petulant jut and gave him the look of some talking animal in a cartoon, a pouting porker in a two-hundred-buck blue suit.
    Jonsen was parked in my spot, so I left my van across the street, in front of the home of one of my friendlier neighbors. I crossed to the Buick and rapped on the window. Jonsen flashed a mean irritated look and pushed something, and the window on my side went down a third of the way.
    “You’re Mallory.”
    It wasn’t exactly a statement; it wasn’t exactly a question. I answered him anyway. I said I was Mallory.
    “I have to talk to you. Get in.”
    He made no try at clouding the edge of hostility in his voice. I didn’t know what to make of him.
    I said, “We could go inside my trailer there and talk, if you’d like.”
    “The car will do fine, thank you.”
    He said thank you like screw you.
    I hesitated.
    “Will you get in?”
    I nodded yes, and the window slid back up.
    And so I got in. It was more than just cool in there; it was cold, uncomfortably so. In the backseat of the Buick were stacks of brochures put out by the feed company Jonsen worked for. After his flop at running his own service station, his mother had told me, Edward Jonsen had taken a job as a salesman for a big local feed company, and had evidently done fairly well, probably due to his farm background, which must’ve made it easy for him to relate to rural feed dealers.
    Even now, you could see he’d been raised on a farm. His hands, which gripped the steering wheel as if he were driving and not sitting still, were hard, rough, callused, powerful. Hands that had worked. Hands that could do you damage. And yet the overall impression he gave was one of softness; the strength that obviously resided in his massively framed body was layered with the tissue of obesity.
    “I’d like to express my sympathy for your loss,” I said. “Your mother was a fine woman. I was happy to know her, even if it was only for a short time.”
    “Spare me your hypocrisy.”
    His jowls quivered as he spoke, the doughy, paste-white skin and the Zero Mostel hair making him an all-around unpleasant-looking human being. I wondered how the hell he could make a living as a salesman.
    “I don’t follow you,” I said. “What do you mean, hypocrisy?”
    “My mother’s death
is
a great loss to me. But I was brought up to accept reality and the defeat it occasionally brings, so if youare attempting to mislead me by your pretended ignorance, or are simply hoping to