The Deader the Better by Ford G. M

Author:Ford, G. M. [Ford, G. M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: thriller, Mystery, detective, Seattle, Suspense, Crime
ISBN: 9780061844928
Google: 2STCKN-7tcMC
Amazon: 0061844926
Goodreads: 10202866
Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
Published: 2000-02-08T08:00:00+00:00

18

JED HELD A BOTTLE OF RÉMY MARTIN LOUIS XIII. COMESin a crystal decanter at a mere thirteen hundred bucks a fifth.

“A drink?” he asked.

“Sure,” I said. “Why not?”

He crossed the room to the built-in bar and poured us each a hundred bucks worth.

Around ten, I’d gone for a drive. The streets had been deserted. Nobody out but me and the losers with no place to go. Around eleven-thirty, without consciously willing it so, I’d found myself parked in Jed’s driveway, so I’d figured, what the hell…might as well knock on the door. The maid answered. “Oh,” was all she’d said. Jed appeared over her shoulder. “Leo,” he said, taking the door from her hand.

“Come in.”

Sarah, the girls, the hubbys and the new granddaughter were all tucked in their beds, presumably experiencing those visionary sugar plums of song and story. Jed ushered me into the den, while Marie headed back for the kitchen. I stuck my nose in the oversized snifter and took a tendollar whiff. A golden chain pulsed across the surface of the rich amber liquid. I looked around. The table on my right held one of those clocks in a glass dome. The golden balls twirling silently in one direction and then stopping and twirling back the other.

The den was Jed’s domain and, as such, had been spared the holiday treatment. He used the long butane lighter to get the gas fireplace going. We all used gas these days. Hell, these days, you had to drive seventy-five miles to get somewhere you could cut wood. Not to mention that none of us even knew anybody with a pickup truck anymore. He retrieved his brandy from the mantel.

“Everything okay?” he asked.

“Oh yeah,” I said. “I just happened to be in the neighborhood.” I checked my watch. “At eleven-forty-five on Christmas Eve.”

“That’s what I figured. Nice to see you getting out, though, by the way.”

“Wouldn’t want to get mansion fever.”

“Certainly not,” he agreed.

I took a sip of the cognac and looked around the sumptuous room. “You ever wonder about all of this?” I asked. “I mean, like who we were when we first met and who we are now, and like how in hell we got here?”

“No more than a dozen times a day,” he said.

“I mean, you and I are sitting here drinking liquor that costs more than the cars we were driving when we first met.”

He raised his glass in salute. “Viva la France,” he said. We’d known each other for more than twenty years. When I’d first met him, he was fresh from New York and a job as the ACLU’s top litigator. We’d met in jail, where he was cooling his heels on a contempt charge and I was looking at an assault rap, for defending myself against an irate transit cop on whom I’d served a subpoena. In those days, Jed drove a beige Gremlin and worked out of a ratty little office on Third Avenue, right where the new symphony hall stands today. He’d

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