Dave Brandstetter 03 Troublemaker by Joseph Hansen

Author:Joseph Hansen [Hansen, Joseph]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Lgbtq+, General, Mystery & Detective, Private Investigators, Hard-Boiled
ISBN: 9781681990507
Google: usSQEAAAQBAJ
Amazon: 1681990504
Publisher: Soho Press
Published: 2022-01-10T22:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 9

A square package stood on his desk. Brown paper. Twine. It was alone there. He kept the desktop empty. It was a good-looking desk that he'd hunted a long time to find. Slabs of oiled teak hung in a brushed steel frame. Door whispering shut behind him, he frowned and went grimly down the long, cold room. He kept the thermostat low. Somebody had asked him once, "What do you do—hang beef in here?" Doug, he supposed. Doug had accused him before and since of subnormal warmth.

He put on his horn rims and picked up the package. The label was neatly lettered but without a return address. He held it to his ear. Nothing ticked inside. But maybe this one wasn't meant to tick. Maybe opening it was what would trigger it. He dropped into a saddle leather chair that turned its back to a glass wall that showed blank blue sky, a lone helicopter. Out of a deep drawer he lifted his phone but he didn't dial. His father came in.

Carl Brandstetter was a straight, ruddy man of sixty-five with handsome white hair, blue eyes and an expensive tailor. He turned back to say something out the door, let it fall shut, nodded to Dave and walked to a cabinet where liquor, ice, glasses hid themselves behind insulated steel finished to look like wood. He bent to open doors and take out bottles. "Go on with your call."

"It can wait." Dave stood. "What did the doctor tell you?"

"To stop smoking." Carl Brandstetter snorted, dropped miniature ice cubes into a pitcher of thick Danish crystal. "And drinking." He measured gin with a squat glass jigger. "And working." He measured vermouth, set the bottles back, found ajar of stuffed olives, shut the door. "And sex." From the snowy little cave that was the freezer compartment he took stem glasses and dropped an olive into each.

Dave said, "That doesn't leave you many options."

"Backgammon." His father moved the crowded ice with a glass rod. "At the senior citizen center. And a little light shuffleboard, maybe once a week." He poured from the pitcher, turned, smiling, holding out a frost-crusted glass to Dave. "But no tournaments. Nothing to work up the adrenaline."

"Heart?" Dave took the glass, tasted the drink.

"It appears to be broken." Carl Brandstetter sat in a white goat-hide chair and placed his glass on a low glass-and-steel table where an Aztec metate—rough gray stone on three legs—was the ashtray. "That would give some women in this city a laugh."

"It was always their hearts," Dave said. There had been nine of them, if you included only wives. Carl Brandstetter wasn't a collector —he was a discarder. Dave watched him start a cigarette with a gold lighter that for shape and incising matched his cuff links. "You're smoking. You're drinking."

The older man said, "I feel fine. When I'm dead I'll no doubt think giving it up would have been worth it. Right now, it's unreal. The sun is shining. I have a lovely

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