Straub, Peter - Floating Dragon by Straub Peter

Author:Straub, Peter [Straub, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780007336739
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2012-02-25T14:37:29+00:00

14

Very late that Saturday night, three events of varying importance took place which were related to the fears of Richard Allbee and Tabby Smithfield, and which pointed the direction things would go now the threshold had been breached. On that Saturday night, Hampstead was irrevocably into the second stage of its destruction.

The first of these events was that Richard Allbee telephoned Laura at eleven-thirty, just about the time that Tabby Smithfield awoke in the grip of an inexplicable urgency. He was out of sorts after a long evening of listening to Morris Stryker destroy his initial plans for the College Street house— Stryker, incredibly, wanted a Bauhaus interior—and he was drunk enough to be slurring his words. Stryker had insisted on putting a bottle of fifty-year-old cognac on the table and having Toby Chambers pour out for all of them. Chambers himself was excused from drinking, but Stryker made it clear that Hagen and Richard had to have as much of the cognac as he did.

Laura answered the phone on the eighth ring, and he suddenly felt much better. "Oh, thank God," he said. "I know it's late to be calling, but I was worried."

"Worried about what?" Laura said.

"About . . . you know what. The client just told me that there'd been another murder in Hampstead. He read about it in the paper. I think the client's a mobster. He thought it was a barrel of laughs."

"Are you drunk?" Laura asked.

"Of course I'm drunk. I've been out with Morris Stryker, and the penalty of not getting drunk is being roasted over a slow fire. I couldn't risk it. Really, Stryker's a mobster. Every night, men rush up to him in restaurants and give him padded envelopes."

"Oh, dear," Laura said. "You're not having a very good time, are you?"

"I'm having a terrible time. Being roasted might be a ball, compared to this. But tell me what happened. Who was killed?"

"Nobody we know. The gardener who works around here. I think I've seen him a couple of times."

"Sure you've seen him. He's always working. That's who was killed? Where? When?"

"I'm not sure. The body was only found yesterday. He'd been dead a couple of days, I gather. Richard, I'm very tired. You woke me up, and I don't want to talk about this now. I just want you to come home."

"I wish I could," he said. "I'm going to have to redo a lot of my work, so I'll probably have to be here another couple of days. Please be safe."

"I'll be safe," she said. "Next time, call at a regular hour. I'm going back to bed."

Richard said, "I'll call tomorrow, whenever I can get away from Ivan the Terrible."

"Love you."

"And I love you. Why aren't you here with me?"

"You went away," she said.

Some short time after that, Patsy McCloud stirred in her sleep. Her in-laws had just left that evening to return to Phoenix, and Patsy had not been able to keep her eyes open past ten o'clock.

A second later,

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