Uncivil seasons: a novel by Michael Malone

Author:Michael Malone [Malone, Michael]
Language: zho
Format: epub
Tags: #genre
ISBN: 9781570717550
Publisher: Sourcebooks Landmark
Published: 2001-08-31T16:00:00+00:00

“Guess. Now, Justin, why in holy shit did you run off that way? I come out and you’re gone wandering off in the snow like old Doctor Zhivago. And so I ask your pal Sister Resurrection out there— wearing, I do believe, your scarf like she ate the rest of you—I ask her, ‘Sister, did you see a good-looking crazy man go by?’ But we don’t speak the same lingo the way you and her do, and all I got for an answer was that God’s in a real bad mood and lost His patience with trash, which I hope was not in reference to me.”

By now I had crossed the Dollard foyer and had climbed the stairs to the landing.

Cuddy shook his head. “You know, maybe you do need a sick leave. You look bad. You haven’t even changed your clothes, and that scares me. And excuse me being lewd, but did you maybe come or pee in your pants?”

I said, “What are you doing here? It’s coffee.”

A sleepless night had reddened the blue-jay eyes and shadowed the old acne scars. He still wore the three-piece herringbone suit he’d put on (or bought—I’d never seen it before) to take Briggs out last night to dinner. I’d been telling Cuddy for years that if he really wanted to take over the department; he had to stop wearing things like Elvis sweatshirts. Maybe love would be his tailor. I said, “Nice suit.”

He tilted his head at me. “I know you, General. I may not know you, but I know you. I suspicioned there might be an attempted break-in at this residence coming up, and I figured the police ought to be on the scene. And since you ain’t the police, being as V.D., that old spitlicking toadeater has fired, excuse me, suspended, your ass, I figured I would save you from the temptation of committing an illegality. Call me Tonto, for you are sure enough the lonesome ranger now.”

“You’re the one waltzing around his house without a warrant,” I said.

He rippled his bony hand in his jacket pocket, tugged out a loud tie, and then the paper. “Oh, I gots de warrant.”

“How?”

“Mister Ken Moize. And I got something else for you, you just going to love.” He crooked his long skinny arm and darted it at the open door of Cloris Dollard’s bedroom.

Inside, boxes were piled on the bare mattress of the queen-size bed. Cuddy loped around the bed and patted them. “I was just tidying up the lady’s closet a bit waiting on you, because it didn’t look to me like anybody’d paid it much mind, and this box here,” he tapped a cardboard crate labeled Mumms’ Champagne, “well, sir, it was full of little children’s clothes still with the price tags on them. I guess she was planning on sending them off to her little grandchildren. So I wonder, maybe this was where she kept stuff she hadn’t gotten around to mailing off to folks, like Mrs. Cadmean said she was going to.

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