The Hook by Donald Westlake

Author:Donald Westlake
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Suspense, FIC022000
ISBN: 0892965886
Publisher: Warner
Published: 2000-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Sixteen

The appointment with Detective Johnson was for eleven the next morning. Normally, Wayne didn’t like to dose himself indiscriminately with drugs, but this morning, after Susan left for work, he took half a Valium. It was her prescription, rarely used, for those times when her job became too stressful. Wayne had almost never taken one, and didn’t want to be zoned out when Johnson got here, but that would be better than being hopped-up, manic.

He hadn’t mentioned Johnson to Susan yet, because what was the point? She’d have all day to worry about it, for no reason. When it was all over, he’d tell her what had happened. With, he hoped, a relieved laugh.

Johnson was exactly on time, and when he came in he didn’t seem threatening at all. A moderately dark black man, tall and not too heavy, mild in his manner, he seemed more like somebody who worked in a bank or for some bureaucracy than a homicide detective. “Thank you for seeing me, Mr. Prentice,” he said, as though Wayne had had a choice in the matter.

“Anything I can do,” Wayne assured him. “Would you like a cup of coffee?”

Johnson smiled. “Oh, I better not,” he said. “I drink coffee all day long sometimes, I think I’m putting the people at ease, the end of the day, I got the heebie-jeebies.”

Wayne grinned, liking the man. “Then I guess we just sit down,” he said.

They sat in the living room, and Johnson said, “You know what this is about.”

“Lucie Proctorr.”

“You met her fairly recently, I believe,” Johnson said. He wasn’t taking notes, seemed just to be having a casual conversation.

“I guess it must have been the weekend before she died,” Wayne said. “Or the Thursday, really.”

“It was at a play?”

“Yes. The playwright introduced me. I asked him to.”

Johnson was interested in that. “You asked him to?”

“I’m an old friend of her husband’s,” Wayne said. “Bryce. We knew each other twenty years ago, more than twenty years ago, here in the city, we were both trying to make it as writers.”

“You did some novels yourself,” Johnson suggested.

“Yes, sure,” Wayne said. “When the first one was published, I went to Italy for a year, research for the second book. When I got back, I’d lost touch with some of the people I knew, including Bryce. Then he became famous, and I didn’t”—Wayne shrugged—“it seemed awkward to get in touch with him, after a while.”

“But you did it, finally.”

“No, he called me. What I think it was,” Wayne said, “when his marriage broke up, I think maybe he was lonely, or the friends they’d had were mostly her friends. I think he looked up people he hadn’t seen for a while, including me. We met a couple of times, we had coffee—” Wayne broke off, and laughed, and said, “Not too much coffee.”

“No, that’s good,” Johnson said, and smiled. “But how did you get from there to this play?”

“Well, Bryce really talked against Lucie,” Wayne said. He’d been working out this story in his mind since yesterday afternoon, and thought it was solid now.

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