The Wind Chill Factor by Thomas Gifford Read Free Book Online Page A

fixed me from behind his gold-rimmed spectacles. “Might be twenty-four hours, it’s really quite impossible to say until we take a closer look.”
    I nodded dumbly.
    “John,” Bradlee said slowly, rubbing his great banana nose with a forefinger, regarding Cyril’s body, “there’s something about this … it doesn’t ring true to me and I can’t quite put my finger on it. Apparently his heart stopped beating and he slumped over and died.” He shook his head. “But … you say you didn’t know he was home?”
    “No. I thought he hadn’t gotten here yet. I was in the house last night and he wasn’t here then.”
    “How do you know?’
    “Well, I didn’t see him, I didn’t hear him.”
    “I’m going to notify the police. Now don’t look that way. I’m merely going to report the death. In a case of this type, when we don’t know when or how he died I suggest that we find out.” He touched my sleeve. “Just to satisfy ourselves. We’ll have to have an autopsy. You’ll have to agree to that, my boy.”
    I nodded.
    While Bradlee used the telephone, I fed logs into the library fireplace and told Paula what had happened upstairs.
    “Does that mean that Doctor Bradlee thinks there might be something wrong?” She shivered against the back of the chair and drew her legs up underneath her. The wind howled outside.
    “God knows,” I said.
    “I wonder what he was going to do here? It’s so ironic. He came all the way from Buenos Aires to talk to you and to me, and now he’s dead. So absurd, so futile. …”
    I put my hand on her shoulder. I’d felt a prickling of my skin as she spoke. Bradlee was standing in the doorway, consulting his gold pocket watch which hung from a gold chain across his vest.
    “I’ve called Olaf Peterson. He’s new since your time here, chief of our little police force. He was a detective down in the Cities, made a name for himself in cracking a couple of murder cases, and then married an heiress involved in one of the cases and was suddenly a wealthy man, member of the White Bear Yacht Club, the Minneapolis Club because of his father-in-law, and he said the hell with being an underpaid, hardworking cop. Anyway, he came up here to live on a farm with a house overlooking the river and some of us asked him to help us out with our piddling little police work, on an advisory basis if nothing else, and now we pay him a dollar a year to be our police chief. He seems to enjoy it.”
    “What did he say?”
    “He said he’d come on over and take a look if he can get his car out. It must be getting worse out there.”
    I put a Beethoven quartet on the phonograph and we all sat in the library, quietly, unable to get the idea of Cyril overhead, slumped, dead in a chair, out of our minds. The Nazis and my grandfather looked down at us from the library walls. Eventually we heard a car through the storm, saw headlights poking at the blowing snow. It was the third car in front of the house, snow piling up on them, and when I opened the door I saw that Olaf Peterson was driving a black four-door Cadillac sedan. He was smoking a cigar as he charged hurriedly up the walk.
    “How are you?” he said. “I’m Olaf Peterson.” He shook my hand.

Ten
    O LAF PETERSON DID NOT come out in the snow to stand around chatting, exchanging pleasantries about the Minnesota weather. He asked Bradlee where the body was and I followed them up the stairway. Paula was staying in the library. Peterson was of medium height, wore a rust-colored suede trench coat cut elegantly with a few strategically placed button flaps. He was dark, almost swarthy, more like a figure from the Levantine than from the fjords. He had a thick black mustache which curled down around the corners of his mouth. He was not at all what I had expected.
    Standing in the master bedroom again, I watched him survey the scene with his chin cupped in a dark, hairy hand. His spatulate fingers were well manicured. He’d opened his trench coat,