Liar's Dice by Gabriel Valjan

Author:Gabriel Valjan [Gabriel Valjan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Level Best Books
Published: 2023-02-24T00:00:00+00:00

Professors Row is the aorta to the heart of the university, and I was sitting on the address for Capen House.

Vanessa exited the building at five minutes past the hour. She was on the move, and I hoped she’d lead me to Sal and not to a lecture hall where some dull professor of poetry would spend forty-five minutes trying to convince his students that Wordsworth meeting Coleridge in 1795 was the significant literary event of the eighteenth century. I didn’t want to sit in the back of the room where I would resist the temptation to heckle him and say that day occurred in the nineteenth century, as in Christmas Day in 1806, the day Coleridge walked in on Wordsworth in bed with his sister-in-law Sara Hutchinson.

I hung back about eight feet behind Vanessa. The last time I’d seen her, she was lean and eighteen, sorting out her weapons in the armory. She has since moved from the meow to the purr. She walked proud and fierce, loyal to the cause and wearing the beret of the Black Panther Party.

She turned the corner. All that swagger and bravado notwithstanding, she was unaware I was following her. I waited until she’d inserted the key into the lock to the front door of the apartment complex before I called her. She looked at me. She said my name in a way that was both recognition and a question. “Shane Cleary, is that you?”

“Can we talk inside?”

“We wouldn’t be alone.”

“I was counting on that.” I rubbed the sides of my arms. “C’mon, it’s cold out here.”

She unlocked the front door and invited me in. She used another key for the lobby door, and a third, to open the mailbox. She said her apartment was on the third floor. I climbed the stairs behind her. Vanessa looked over her shoulder, “You’re wondering if I’m still with Sal, aren’t you?”

“I know you are. The two of you sent postcards from around the world.”

“My uncle John send you?”

I do my best not to disclose a client’s identity. We stood in front of the door to her place. This expedition was turning into a trip down the Panama Canal with a door, a key, and another lock. Each question seemed like a station where my answer paid a toll. Her eyes widened with realization.

“His uncle hired you?”

“Nothing is what it seems.”

“The hell it ain’t.”

“I’m not the one who sent the postcards, including one postmarked from Somerville. Now, unlock the door, Vanessa. We need to talk.”

“Sal is inside.”

“Excellent, because he’s part of the we in our conversation.”

Sal must’ve heard the bolt thrown because the happy face that accompanied his, ‘Happy you’re home, babe,’ hit the floor and disappeared into the shag carpet when he saw me. I could see him plotting his escape, but it would be his luck to bounce off the hard glass of the sliding doors to the balcony. I held my hand up and sounded like something out of a TV soap. “I just want to talk.

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