When the Sacred Ginmill Closes by Lawrence Block Read Free Book Online

drinks, unwinding after the pressure of a weekend with my sons, settling myself down after awakening old memories with a visit toWashingtonHeights.
    But I knew better. I was starting some half-assed purposeless investigation, trying to turn up a lead to the pair who'd hit Morrissey's.
    I wound up in a gay bar calledSinthia's. Kenny, who owned the place, was minding the store, serving drinks to men in Levi's and ribbed tank tops. Kenny was slender, willowy, with dyed blond hair and a face that had been tucked and lifted enough to look no more than twenty-eight, which was about half as many years as Kenny had been on the planet.
    "Matthew!" he called out. "You can all relax now, girls. Law and order has come toGrove Street."
    Of course he didn't know anything about the robbery at Morrissey's. He didn't know Morrissey's to begin with; no gay man had to leave the Village to find a place where he could get a drink after closing. But the holdup men could have been gay as easily as not, and if they weren't spending their take elsewhere they might be spending it in the joints around Christopher Street, and anyhow that was the way you worked it, you nosed around, you worked all your sources, you put the word out and waited to see if anything came back to you.
    But why was I doing this? Why was I wasting my time?
    I don't know what would have happened- whether I would have kept at it or let go of it, whether I would have gotten someplace or ultimately turned away from a cold trail. I didn't seem to be getting anywhere, but that's often the way it is, and you go through the motions with no indication of progress until you get lucky and something breaks. Maybe something like that would have happened.Maybe not.
    Instead, some other things happened to take my mind off Tim Pat Morrissey and his quest for vengeance.
    For openers, somebody killed TommyTillary's wife.

Chapter 4
    Tuesday night I took Fran to dinner at the Thai restaurant SkipDevoe liked so much. Afterward I walked her home, with a stop for after-dinner drinks at Joey Farrell's. In front of her building she pleaded an early day again, and I left her there and walked back to Armstrong's with a stop or two en route. I was in a sour mood, and astomachful of unfamiliar food didn't help any. I probably hit the bourbon a little harder than usual, rolling out of there around one or two. I took the long way home, picked up the Daily News, and sat on the edge of my bed in my underwear taking a quick look at a couple of stories.
    On one of the inside pages I read about aBrooklyn woman who'd been killed in the course of a burglary. I was tired and I'd had a lot to drink and the name didn't register.
    But I woke up the next morning with something buzzing in my mind, half dream and half memory. I sat up and reached for the paper and found the story.
    MargaretTillary, forty-seven, had been stabbed to death in the upstairs bedroom of her home onColonial Road, in the Bay Ridge section ofBrooklyn, evidently having awakened in the course of a burglary. Her husband, securities salesman Thomas J.Tillary, had become concerned when his wife failed to answer the telephone Tuesday afternoon. He called a relative living nearby who entered the house, finding the premises ransacked and the woman dead.
    "This is a good neighborhood," a neighbor was quoted as saying. "Things like this don't happen here." But a police source cited a marked increase in area burglaries in recent months, and another neighbor referred obliquely to the presence of a "bad element" in the neighborhood.
    It's not a common name. There's aTillaryStreet in Brooklyn, not far from the entrance to theBrooklynBridge, but I've no idea what war hero or ward heeler they named it after, or if he's a relative of Tommy's. There are severalTillerys in theManhattan phone directory, spelled with an e. ThomasTillary, securities salesman, Brooklyn - it seemed as though it had to be Telephone Tommy.
    I took a shower and shaved and went out for