02 Rumpelstiltskin by Ed McBain

Author:Ed McBain
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Mystery
ISBN: 9781612181974
Publisher: Chivers Press
Published: 1981-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

7

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IT WAS normally a twenty-minute ride from the New Orleans International Airport to the French Quarter, but the traffic on 61 was heavy, and our driver had to stop first at the Saint Louis Hotel on Bienville to drop off Joanna, Dale, and the luggage. The law offices of Foelger, Haythorn, Pelessier and Cortin were only half a dozen blocks away, but one-way streets in and out of the Quarter can pose problems of their own, and I did not get to Number One Shell Square until almost seven o’clock on Friday night.

The building was a monolithic monstrosity that occupied a full city block from Carondelet to St. Charles and Perdido to Poydras. Its entrance doors were on Carondelet, where the taxi dropped me, and access to them was gained first by climbing a short flight of steps to a landing some thirty feet across, at the outer edge of which was a standing, bronze-framed, ONE SHELL SQUARE marker, and then climbing another ten steps or so to a second landing, and yet another ten steps to a third landing across which were the spaced doorways with their brown antiglare glass. I felt rather as if I were climbing pyramids along the Nile. In the lobby a Burns Security guard sat inside a waist-high, oval counter fashioned of the same stone as the building itself, something that looked like a cross between marble and granite. He asked me if I was a Shell employee, and when I told him I wasn’t, he pulled back the ledger he had been in the process of offering, and asked me to sign my name in a second book instead. He told me to make sure I signed out when I left, and then gratuitously pointed out the location of the elevator bank. I stopped at the wall directory first, found a room number for Foelger, Haythorn, Pelessier and Cortin, and then took the elevator up to the seventh floor.

There was no one sitting behind the desk in the ultra-modern reception area with its white Formica desk and its dark blue carpet, its Mondrian print on the wall opposite the entrance doors, its modular sofas and easy chairs. But I heard a typewriter going someplace down the hall, and I found a harried secretary who seemed relieved I was offering her a brief respite from the tyranny of her machine and all those legal-sized pages scattered on her desk. She personally escorted me to a closed walnut door at the end of the hall, and then asked if I would like a cup of coffee. I told her I would not. I knocked on the door and a voice within said, “Yes, come in, please.”

David Haythorn was perhaps seventy years old, a frail-looking man with surprisingly jet-black hair and stern brown eyes set in a face that resembled browned and weathered parchment. His office, like the reception area and the other offices I’d peeked into along the hall, was decorated in a

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