The Hardboiled Detective 1 by Ben Solomon

Author:Ben Solomon [Solomon, Ben]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery
Publisher: Ben Solomon
Published: 2014-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Statement No. 7:

Anna Burgle

Sometimes people just plain vanish. That bucks the cliche, all right. The old Indian rope trick. You ask Anna Burgle, if you can get a thing out of her. Anything at all. But you’ll manage it. One way or another. You’ll make something out of it, you will. The department can’t just leave it alone. Can’t let it just sit. You boys never do. Sure.

I wonder how a roomful of alienists gets along with that lady. What’s left of her. Headshrinkers—that’s what the department’s going to throw her up against. Am I right or am I right? First you trump up some charge, lay on any charge, so you can justify the mug shots, the prints. After that, bombs away. Reflex tests and personality tests and Rorschach tests. The IQ tests and free association tests. Lots of luck to all of them, and they can keep it.

Mr. Burgle. There’s the real odd man out. He’s the one screwed over but good. And then, of course, there’s Goldie. A real question mark, that one.

Okay, skip it. I’m ready to dish it out. See if you boys can keep those ears from flapping. In the end there’s probably nothing to my yarn. But I couldn’t just bring in Mrs. Burgle and walk away, could I? Dump her off like a sack of wet cement? Cut out like that on Mr. Burgle? Go ahead, take it all down, make out of it what you will. Then you can take a good look in the mirror and see where that and two bits get you.

People don’t just vanish. That’s what Mr. Burgle had to tell me. That’s what he told me, and that’s what he asked me. In one and the same breath. I straightened him out on that one. I straightened him out on a lot of things.

Mr. Emeric Burgle, mortician’s assistant. Married thirty years. Father of one—mark that one completely unexpected. Short, stout, a regular bulldog of a mug. The kind of build like he’d been inflated inside his clothing with a bicycle pump.

Burgle hung onto this black derby. Never left his grip. Not for one moment during the appointment. He stroked it, gestured with it, spun it in his hands and played with it in a thousand ways. Maybe Goldie gave it to him, for all I know. Sure.

Mr. Burgle deposited himself in the client chair, gave me that loneliest bird in the world look. All balled up and small in the straight-back, he was. No friends. No real family left. Desperate, you could call him, in an unspoken kind of way. He took to sighing a lot with his eyes closed.

In this game, you never stop getting a read on clients. Some play it foxy and put on a dodge. Those are the dangerous ones, the ones to keep your eye on, the intriguing ones. The rest are mostly everyday types. They put up the strong front, like the reason they’re there doesn’t hardly matter. The read on them is cake—they’re trying to bluff it out, bluffing themselves as much as anyone.

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