The Naked Detective by Laurence Shames Read Free Book Online Page A

some yoga. You walk all stiff."
    I didn't see the point of telling her that at that moment I was walking stiff so that I would not fall down.
    "Well," she said, "I'm sorry to barge in on you. But I feel better for having talked—don't you?"
    I didn't have to think about it long. "No," I said. "I don't."
    She just pressed her lips together and moved smoothly down the porch steps. I watched her climb onto her bike with the yin-yang on the chain guard and pedal off.

7
    Next morning I got beat again at tennis, this time by an old slicer-and-dicer whose forehand is a tic and whose backhand is a weaselly, contorted little push—a guy I really shouldn't lose to. Not to make excuses, but I had a couple of pretty good ones. For one thing, I was hung over from the grappa. For another it was sort of on my mind that maybe I was wanted for murder.
    On my way to Bayview Park, I'd stopped, as usual, before the rank of newspaper machines in front of Fausto's market. And there, above the fold in the Sentinel , was word that Lefty Ortega was no more.
    I should not have been surprised—though of course I'd wanted to believe that the docs would get the tough old bastard stabilized, that he'd resume his wigged-out drifting toward the end, and that the crisis precipitated by my visit somehow wouldn't count. So I forced myself to act like I was shocked, riffled quickly through a weak repertoire of amazement—the caught breath, the tsking of the tongue. Then I dug two quarters from the bottom of my tennis bag, and, in what was quickly turning into an unhappy and life-draining habit, I bought the goddamn paper and read it standing on the sidewalk.
    The article did not specify the time of Lefty's death, but said that it was afternoon. This sent me delving into morbid subtleties. If he was dead by the time the running medics reached his bedside, did that mean I killed him? How about if he jerked and gurgled another twenty minutes? How about an hour? Did some kind of buzzer go off when the period of guilt expired? But come on, the guy was dying anyway. Then again, everybody murdered is dying anyway. Maybe the miserable bully had one kind and charitable thought left in him, one instant of joy, one spoonful of redemption. When could you say with certainty that somebody was finished?
    This philosophical muddle soon gave way to practical considerations, in the midst of which I vaguely realized I was thinking like a criminal. Who'd seen me at the hospital? I'd asked for Lefty at Intensive and at Critical. There was a duty nurse in Hospice who'd probably noticed me hanging around; there was the smiling woman with the cart of magazines. And there was Lefty's daughter—at least I assumed that's who she was. We'd exchanged a glance when she came out of the room, and it had seemed to me that her eyes were dry enough to see through. All these people were witnesses, potential enemies. I wasn't used to having enemies. I wasn't used to feeling furtive. And, now that I thought of it, I'd never regarded myself as an unhealthy person to be around. Why was everyone I met suddenly dying?
    Distractedly scanning the rest of the front page, I noticed a small follow-up item about the killing on Sunset Key. The cops had still not managed to identify the victim. Big surprise. They were asking anyone with information to come forward. Fat chance. No chance now. Let them figure out on their own who Kenny Lukens was, and that these two deaths were, in some murky way, connected.
    I threw the paper in the garbage, as if by trashing that one copy I could erase the day's events. A homeless guy came along and plucked it out ten seconds later. I continued on my way to tennis, and of course I played like shit. Who wouldn't have?
    But the strangest thing about that tennis game was that I didn't go home afterward. I always go straight home from tennis. Get out of my sweaty clothes, have a soak or a swim, analyze, regroup. This, I realize, may seem like just some aimless, trivial