Kinds of Love, Kinds of Death by Donald E Westlake

Author:Donald E Westlake [Westlake, Donald E]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, Mystery & Detective, Private Investigators
ISBN: 9781480428935
Google: mraROLejZ2cC
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2013-06-24T12:00:00+00:00

seventeen

THE SOUND OF RAIN woke me before seven on Saturday morning. I hurried into my clothes and went out back to cover the hole with tarpaulins. From now on I would have to put the first layer or two of concrete block down as I went along, so rain wouldn’t have a chance to cause cave-ins or alter the dimensions of the hole. Maybe, if the rain let up later on, I could put the blocks down in the first part this afternoon.

I didn’t think of the job until later on, when I was sitting in the kitchen drinking my first cup of coffee and watching Kate, in her robe, moving back and forth as she readied breakfast. Then it occurred to me that Kate wouldn’t be going to work today because I had become the breadwinner around here again.

The thought didn’t cheer me. In the course of moving around Ernie Rembek’s world yesterday I had gradually built up a professional enthusiasm for the task at hand, but the enthusiasm hadn’t survived until this morning. I wanted to fill my attention with the wall, with the problems caused by rain, and instead I was being dragged away into this other thing, this mean and petty shuffling through degraded lives in a pointless quest for the slayer of a whore. What did I care about Rita Castle? What did I care about anything?

I even toyed with the notion of sending Ernie Rembek back his five thousand dollars—I could telegraph it to him, I wouldn’t even have to go to Manhattan—but the presence of Kate, here in the kitchen with me, made it impossible. Both because my quitting would mean she would have to go to work herself today after all, and because she was putting so much hope into the beneficial results she was hoping this Rembek job would bring.

So I tried to turn my attention to the job, and with some difficulty I did manage to do some thinking about it, to recall to mind the five suspects I had seen last night. Were any of them at all likely?

Einhorn first. He had run away, but I took that to be more a sign of character than of guilt. He was a young man who would run away from anything, which would most likely include overtures from Rita Castle. He was unlikely.

Hogan, the one who admitted to having “inspected” Rita when she annoyed him. His character too seemed wrong for the man I was after, too self-contained, too machined, too brisk and neat. I visualized the killer as a sloppier man, a man whose emotional and/or financial sloppiness had finally resolved themselves in the ultimate sloppiness of murder.

Lydon, the real-estate man with the view. He seemed sloppy enough, but was unlikely from the other direction. I could imagine Rita Castle going off with either Einhorn or Hogan—the first because she could dominate him and the second because he could dominate her—but I couldn’t see at all where she would have gone off with Lydon.

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