The Lemur by Benjamin Black Read Free Book Online Page B

cops?” Then he grinned. “Joke. I keep a tab open.”
    In the street Glass paused to light a cigarette, and the captain stood with his hands in his pockets and watched him, shaking his head. “You should quit,” he said. “Believe me, it makes a difference. Even in the sack—you got more breath.”
    They waited at the lights and then crossed.
    “Mr. Mulholland know about you and Dylan Riley?” the policeman asked.
    “There wasn’t much to know.”
    They were at the door of the station. Glass was unsure if he was free to go; maybe the real questioning had not started yet. He had so far only met the good cop, surely the bad one would be along any minute. The captain stopped, and turned to him. “You know you were the last person Dylan Riley called? That makes you the last one to talk to him alive.”
    “You mean, the second-last.”
    Captain Ambrose grinned again. “Yeah. Right.”

6
     
    ALL HANDS!
     
    John Glass disliked the sprawling apartment where he and his wife lived, more or less. More or less, in that Louise lived there, while he merely joined her in the evenings, stayed overnight, and left in the mornings. That, at least, was how he thought of it. To an observer—and the wealthy and fashionable Mrs. Glass was always under scrutiny—the Glasses would have seemed a typical Upper East Side couple. Louise made sure that it should stay that way. She was careful to preserve appearances not least for fear of her father and what he would do if she allowed a scandal to develop. William Mulholland’s bitter disapproval of divorce was well known, and he had been heard to accuse his daughter, no more than half jokingly, of being a bigamist. Big Bill had not much liked Rubin Sinclair, Louise’s first husband, but, as she later told Glass one Champagnelit night when they were first together, he had liked it even less when she announced, no doubt with a quaver of terror in her voice, that the marriage had gone hopelessly awry and that she was filing for divorce. Her father had not argued with her, Louise said, in some wonderment, had not shouted or threatened. The mildness of his response had been more frightening to her than any show of rage. “You took a vow, Lou,” he had said gravely. “You took a vow, and now you’re breaking it.”
    After the divorce came through Louise had fled with her ten-year-old son to Ireland, to her father’s big old Georgian house in Connemara, to tend her soul’s wounds and figure out how to rebuild her life. In Ireland she had met John Glass—for the first time, as she had thought, for she had forgotten that long-ago windblown afternoon at the nearby Huston place—and something about him, a detached, dreamy something, had seemed the perfect balm for her bruised spirit. John Glass was everything that Rubin Sinclair was not. Or so she had thought. For his part, John Glass was certain, despite all he knew of Fate and her caprices, that the fact of this exquisite creature’s having drifted a second time into his orbit was a circumstance to be seized upon without delay. He proposed on the date that, three months previously, her divorce came through. “Oh, God,” Louise said, a laughing wail, “what will my father say!”
    Once again Big Bill’s response had been unexpectedly mild. He liked, it seemed, John Glass. He still had friends in the surveillance world and had got them to look into his past—“Don’t mind it, son, it’s an old habit”—and was satisfied with what was turned up. Glass had never been married, and therefore not divorced, he was admired in his profession, seemed honest, and was probably not a fortune hunter. “Just one thing,” Big Bill had said to his daughter and her prospective husband, with a smile that seemed only mildly pained, “wait to marry until you’re at least a year divorced, Lou, to save what shreds of respectability our poor old family has left.” And Louise had kissed him. Kissing was not a thing they often did, Big Bill and