The Girl Who Ran Off With Daddy by David Handler

Author:David Handler [Handler, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery
ISBN: 9780553569025
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 1996-03-01T05:00:00+00:00

Eight

I WAITED FOR HIM OUTSIDE on the steps with Lulu. There was already such a crowd up there in room 461—the campus police, NYPD, EMS people, medical examiner’s people. I didn’t want to get in their way. Or get asked what the hell I’d been doing around campus pretending to be the victim’s uncle. A pair of truly ill-looking university administrators arrived while I sat out there. A murder on campus is their worst nightmare. Expensive Ivy League school, none too choice neighborhood … it doesn’t get any worse. The New York press corps showed up as well, reporters and cameramen crowding the entrance to Furnald Hall in desperate search of somebody to talk to or shoot or both. Everywhere I went these days, it seemed, the press showed up. I was beginning to feel like Princess Di.

Very came strutting out about a half hour later. The press he ignored. Me he made right for. I can’t honestly say Detective Lieutenant Romaine Very and I are friends. I can’t honestly say that because he doesn’t like me. We’d been around the bases twice before, most recently when I ghosted the memoirs of Lyle Hudnut, the top-rated TV comic.

“Wish I could say I was glad to see you again, dude,” Very said, his jaw working on a piece of gum.

“I wish you could as well, Lieutenant.”

He started to say something else, stopped, and stood there a moment with his eyes shut and his lips moving silently as if he were, well, talking to himself. Very was in his late twenties, short and muscular and ultra-street, with soft brown eyes, wavy black hair, an earring and a degree in romance languages from this very college. He had on a hooded blue sweatshirt, matching sweatpants and a pair of black Chuck Taylor high-tops. He could have easily passed for a student except for the bulge under his sweatshirt where his gun was. For as long as I’d known him, Romaine Very had had this serious problem with his intensity, as in he had too much of it. Often, he’d vent it by nodding his head rhythmically, as if he heard his own hip-hop beat. But he wasn’t doing that right now. No, there was something decidedly odd about Romaine Very’s behavior right now.

He was smiling at me. Blissfully.

“My alma mater,” he proclaimed happily as he flopped down on the step next to me. “Spent some of the worst fucking years of my life here.” He reached over and patted Lulu, still smiling at me in this most peculiar way. “How’s fatherhood treating you, dude?”

“Shabbily, if the past two days are any indication.” I peered at him curiously. “How did he die?”

“Strangled, bare hands. No apparent motive. Had a hundred bucks in cash still on him.”

“Any idea when?”

“Not yet.”

“Well, we do know he was alive a few minutes before nine.”

Very chuckled at me, a forced chuckle that went on just a little too long. “And how do we know that?” he asked calmly.

“Ian says so,” I replied, continuing to peer at him.

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.