"Jack L Chalker - - G.o.d. Inc 1 - Labyrinth Of Dreams" - читать интересную книгу автора (Chalker Jack L)

Brandy Alexandra Parker. Her father, the colonel, had always liked that drink,
and it made a cute and appropriate name for his only child. Except for the fact
that Harold Parker had been a career soldier and career MP, he and I had a lot
in common. I think I would have really liked him. He'd joined the Army as an
enlisted man at age eighteen, and worked his way up. He was a "consultant" to
the Navy at the Philadelphia Navy Yard when he realized he'd never get any
higher than lieutenant colonelЧwhen you're an Army career man and they post you
to the Navy, they're trying to tell you somethingЧand he'd retired. He was a
proud man who felt a keen obligation to excel just to prove that a black man
could be ten times the soldier of those white smartasses, and considered
prejudice not a barrier but a challenge. He was too old and too overqualified to
get civilian police work, and the places where he could sign on offered him low
and insulting positions, so he decided to try it on his own.
He also was caught up in the romance of the thing, to a degree. Spade & Marlowe.
Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe. Only the best of company for Harold Parker. He
didn't have much savings but he had a pretty fair pension, so he went out, got a
license, rented a cheap office that looked right, and even hired a neighborhood
girl just out of secretarial school as a secretary. A year later, at age
forty-six, he married her. She was already six months pregnant at the time.
Brandy wasn't his biological child, something she was kept ignorant of until she
was in her late teens and he was trying to keep everything together and keep her
from quitting school to help him. Her mother wasn't there to help; she had
suffered from rip-roaring high blood pressure, and after Branday's birth, was
warned not to try again. She worshipped the colonel, though, and became
pregnant. The combination of that and being sloppy with her high-blood-pressure
pills proved fatal. Brandy had been only ten when her mother had dropped dead of
a stroke. She hadn't even gotten to thirty.
The colonel had set up the agency in the Camden ghetto at a time when it was
rare to have a black private eye. He saw a need and filled it in the good old
American tradition, arguing that black folks got divorces and skipped support
payments and fooled around almost as much as white folks did. For a while it
paid. Not handsomely, but when added to his retirement it was adequateЧof
course, his clientele then was of a higher class. When the ghetto became a place
for the very poor, the paying clients went to large agencies with fancy offices
and set rates, some black-owned and -operated, others the same ones that before
hadn't wanted their business. He found himself working longer and harder for a
diminishing client base, and he was no youngster anymoreЧbut he had a youngster.
The paying jobs often required him to be out late, and she wound up more and
more in the care of her mother's relatives, mostly cousins and the like, who
really considered it an obligation and weren't very good at the guardian job.
Brandy understood, but she developed a crushing case of private-eye-itus, caused
by having a father who was a P.I., and by too many television shows, and she had
little interest in school. She was a fat girl with no real family life and was a
class wallflower, kind of like me except for the fat businessЧthat came only
from Bristol. She went a little wild as a teen. The only way to get boys to pay
attention was to proposition them; the rest was taken care of by readily
available drugs. She spent the rest of the time watching black-female-avenger
pictures and reading lurid novels. She was a good reader because her father
always was, but she got lousy grades and didn't really care. Her father,
increasingly trying to hold the business together and with his health beginning