"Edward L. Ferman - Best From F&SF, 23rd Edition" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ferman Edward L)

to do with the Age of the Automobile.) I propped my feet on my desk and leaned back until the old
swivel chair groaned a protest
"What did you find this time, Harry? A nest of international spies or an invasion from Mars?" I guess
Harry Spinner wasn't much use to anyone, not even himself, but I liked him. He'd helped me in a couple
of cases, nosing around in places only the Harry Spinners of the world can nose around hi unnoticed. I
was beginning to get the idea he was trying to play Doctor Watson to my Sherlock Holmes.
"Don't tease me, Bertram. There's a boy here in the hotel. I saw something I don't think he wanted
me to see. It's extremely odd."
Harry was also the only person in the world, except my mother, who called me Bertram. "What did
you see?"
"I'd rather not talk about it over the phone. Can you come over?"
Harry saw too many old private-eye movies on the late show. "It'll be a while. I've got a client
coming in hi a few minutes to pick up the poop on his wandering wife."
"Bertram, you shouldn't waste your rime and talent on divorce cases."
"It pays the bills, Harry. Besides, there aren't enough Maltese falcons to go around."
By the time I filled Lucas McGowan in on all the details (I got the impression he was less concerned
with his wife's infidelity than with her taste; that it wouldn't have been so bad if she'd been shacking up
with movie stars or international playboys), collected my fee, and grabbed a Thursday special at Colonel
Sanders, almost two hours had passed. Harry hadn't answered my knock, and so I let myself in with a
credit card.
Birdie Pawlowicz was a fat, slovenly old broad somewhere between forty and two hundred. She was
blind in her right eye and wore a black felt patch over it. She claimed she had lost the eye in a fight with a
Creole whore over a riverboat gambler. I believed her. She ran the Brewster Hotel the way Florence
Nightingale must have run that stinking army hospital in the Crimea. Her tenants were the losers habitating
that rotting section of the Boulevard east of the Hollywood Freeway. She bossed them, cursed them,
loved them, and took care of them. And they loved her back. (Once, a couple of years ago, a young
black buck thought an old fat lady with one eye would be easy pickings. The cops found him three days
later, two blocks away, under some rubbish in an alley where he'd hidden. He had a broken arm, two
cracked ribs, a busted nose, a few missing teeth, and was stone-dead from internal hemorrhaging.)
The Brewster ran heavily in the red, but Birdie didn't mind. She had quite a bit of property in
Westwood which ran very, very heavily in the black. She gave me an obscene leer as I approached the
desk, but her good eye twinkled.
"Hello, lover!" she brayed hi a voice like a cracked boiler. 'I've lowered my price to a quarter. Are
you interested?" She saw my face and her expression shifted from lewd to wary. "What's wrong, Bert?"
"Harry Spinner. You'd better get the cops, Birdie. Somebody killed him."
She looked at me, not saying anything, her face slowly collapsing into an infinitely weary resignation.
Then she turned and telephoned the police.
Because it was just Harry Spinner at the Brewster Hotel on the wrong end of Hollywood Boulevard,
the cops took over half an hour to get there. While we waited I told Birdie everything I knew, about the
phone call and what I'd found.
"He must have been talking about the Detweiler boy," she said, frowning. "Harry's been kinda
friendly with him, felt sorry for him, I guess."
"What's his room? I'd like to talk to him."
"He checked out"
"When?"
"Just before you came down."
"Damn!"
She bit her lip. "I don't think the Detweiler boy killed him."
"Why?"
"I just don't think he could. He's such a gentle boy."