52 Fat Ollie's Book by Ed McBain

Author:Ed McBain
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Police Procedural, Fiction, Mystery & Detective
ISBN: 9780752842769
Publisher: ORION, 2004
Published: 2004-11-15T05:00:00+00:00

THE OFFICES OFCouncilman Lester Lyle Henderson were close to City Hall, in a part of town still referred to as the Old City. Here stood the ocean-battered seawall the Dutch had built centuries ago, the massive cannons atop it seeming to control the approach from the Atlantic even now, though their barrels had long ago been filled with cement. Here at the very tip of the island, you could watch the Dix and the Harb churning with crosscurrents where the two rivers met. The streets down here had once accommodated only horse-drawn carriages, and were now too narrow to permit the passage of more than a single automobile. Where once there had been two-story wooden taverns, a precious few of which still survived, there were now concrete buildings soaring into the sky, infested redundantly with lawyers and financiers. And yet—perhaps because the Atlantic was right here to touch, rumbling majestically off toward the Old World that had given the city its life—there was still the feel here of what it must have been like when everyone was still very young and very innocent.

There was no sense of the Old World in Henderson’s offices. Neither was there the slightest whiff of innocence. Youth, however, was in rich abundance. The girl sitting behind the reception desk couldn’t have been older than twenty-three. Pert and blond, wearing a very short green mini and a white-buttoned navy blue blouse, she sensed immediately that Kling was the single guy in this dynamic duo, and turned her full attention to him.

“How can I help you?” she asked, smiling radiantly.

She sounded Southern. North Carolina? Georgia? Kling wondered what she was doing in a politician’s office up north.

“We’re here for Alan Pierce,” Kling said.

“Is he expecting you?”

“He is.”

“And you are?” she asked.

Kling felt as if he’d just asked her to dance at the senior prom, and she wanted to know which home room he was in.

“Detective Kling,” he said, and opened the leather fob to which his shield was pinned. “This is my partner, Detective Carella.”

“Is he in?” Carella asked.

“Let me see, sir,” she asked.

Sir. Made Carella feel like forty. Which he was.

The blonde lifted a phone receiver, tapped a button on the phone base, smiled up at Kling, listened, and then said, “Alan, there are two detectives here to see you.” She listened again, said, “Right,” and then put the phone back on the receiver. Smiling at Kling again, she said, “Through the door there, and into the main office. Then through that to Mr. Pierce’s office at the far end. If you need me, just whistle.”

The line sounded familiar to Kling.

They walked past a wall hung with framed campaign posters of bygone years to an unmarked door with a brass knob. Beyond that door was a huge open room banked on one side with windows now open to breezes that blew in off the water where the rivers clashed. There were perhaps twenty desks in this room, all of them the same color as the computers

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.