The Hinky Bearskin Rug by Jennifer Stevenson Read Free Book Online Page A

ambulance?”
    “No, no,
ambulance already came and took away Mr. O’Connor.” The landlady flipped her
apron up to cover her eyes. “Go look. Up there. I give you the key.”
    “I’ll show ’em,”
her husband said.
    “You vill not!
It’s disgusting!” his wife said. She retreated behind the screen door of the
first-floor flat.
    Her husband
gave a growl and mounted the stairs to the second floor with the key in his
hand and Jewel’s team on his heels.
    “Whoa,” Clay
said, first through the door. “Funky.”
    Jewel pushed
past him. It was beyond funky. The bachelor smell of old sweat socks and stale
beer thwapped her like a county-jail pillow in the face. Magazines and
newspapers were piled everywhere. Girlie posters wilted on the walls in the
August heat. Jewel wouldn’t have sat on the sofa for money, though clearly it
had been O’Connor’s favorite spot.
    Over the funk,
she smelled a sweet, flat, musty odor she recognized from hospitals, the smell
of death. O’Connor had died here. She remembered him as a shapeless old fart
hanging around the coffee station upstairs, and then, later, never getting
above the basement lair where the other senior investigators gathered to play
cards. He’d always winked at her. She hadn’t minded.
    “He was a
great reader,” Randy said, reaching for a magazine on a stack.
    “Don’t touch
that!” she said too late.
    As he lifted
the magazine, another poppet sprang up. She looked just like the first one,
blonde and wholesome, with innocent blue eyes, and a very naked body that she
twisted and stroked. Jewel wanted to look away, but the poppet was too — too much. She felt herself blushing. She
wished the landlord would stop leering at the damned thing and go downstairs.
    “More smut,”
Randy said, leafing unconcernedly through the magazine. He turned it sideways,
tipping his head at the fold-out. “Remarkable.” He flipped past the centerfold.
    Jewel eyed the
poppet nervously. “Will it hurt us, do you think? Hey, Lord Perv. Can we do
some work here?”
    He looked up. “This
is abysmally badly written.”
    Clay turned
from picking over the piled bills on a huge wooden spool table. “You’re reading the porn?”
    Jewel rolled
her eyes.
    “Aubrey! You
are coming down here!” the landlady screamed from the bottom of the stairs.
    “You can go
now,” Jewel said to the landlord. He went.
    Randy still
couldn’t get over the stories. “Moreover, this is grossly improbable. One would
suppose, if they had nothing but sex to write of, they could make it plausible.”
    Clay said, “That’s
that lame porn again.”
    “What makes it
lame?” Jewel said, to talk about anything except the teasing, flaunting pin-up
poppet.
    Clay said, “It’s
tame. It’s old-fashioned. It’s, like, porn for prudes. Nipples! Big whoop.”
    “And
unlifelike drivel to boot.” Randy rolled up the magazine, stuffed it in his
back pocket, and squatted to face the poppet. “Nothing unlifelike about you, is
there?” he murmured.
    Jewel squinted
at him. “This from the guy who did me on the porch of the Field Museum in the
snow by moonlight?”
    Clay glanced
up suddenly from tossing through an overflowing wastebasket.
    Jewel bit her
lip.
    “I,” Randy
said, without looking away from the poppet, “can make the impossible completely
real. Not only do these illiterates have no imagination, but I suspect they
don’t even like sex.” He reached out a finger and the poppet leaned forward to
rub her round little breasts against it.
    “You’re pretty
critical for a guy who would rather read porn stories than look at the
pictures,” Clay said unpleasantly. “You couldn’t do any better.”
    “On the
contrary,” Randy began haughtily.
    “I’m not
staying here to listen to your antlers clashing.” Jewel went into the kitchen.
    Clay followed
her. “You indulge him. He’s getting unmanageable.”
    “Not like you.
Good grief, look at this mess.” The kitchen was worse than the