"Wildcards - 07 - Dead Mans Hand" - читать интересную книгу автора (Martin George R R)

Palace was giving a statement to a uniformed cop while a waitress that Chrysalis
has fired last month sobbed loudly in the corner. Other Palace employees waited
on long wooden benches by the window. He recognized three waiters, a dishwasher,
and the guy who played ragtime piano in the Green Room on Thursday nights. But
the most important faces were the ones he didn't see.
Lupo, the relief bartender, sat alone by an unoccupied desk. After he'd dealt
with the paperwork, Jay drifted over. "Can you believe it?" the joker asked.
"What's going to happen to us?" Lupo had deep-set red eyes and a wolfs face.
He'd been shedding; there were hairs all over the shoulders of his denim shirt.
Jay brushed them off. Lupo hardly seemed to notice. "I hear it was you found the
body," he said. "Was it really the ace-of-spades guy?"
"There was a card next to the body," Jay said. "Yeoman," Lupo muttered angrily.
"Son of a bitch. I thought he was gone for good. He used to drink Tullamore Dew.
I served him once or twice."
"Ever see him without the mask?"
Lupo shook his head. "No. I hope they catch the fucker." His long red tongue
lolled from a corner of his mouth.
Jay looked around the room again. "Where's Elmo?"
"No one's seen him. I heard the cops got a whatchacallit, a APB, out on him."
Kant came up behind them. "Your turn, Lupo," he said, gesturing toward an
interrogation room. He stared at Jay. "You still here."
"I'm going, I'm going," Jay said. "As soon as I use the little cops' room."
Kant told him where to find it. By the time Jay emerged, Kant and Maseryk and
Lupo were off doing their thing. Jay went back to the captain's cubicle and
walked in unannounced.
Captain Angela Ellis was behind the desk, chain-smoking as she scanned a file,
flipping pages like a speed reader. She was a tiny Asian woman with green eyes,
long black hair, and the toughest job in the NYPD. Her immediate predecessor had
been found dead in this office, supposedly of a heart attack, but there were
still people who didn't buy that. The captain before him had been murdered, too.
"So," he asked, "you have a lead on Elmo yet?"
Ellis took a drag on her cigarette and looked at him. It took her a moment to
remember who he was. "Ackroyd," she finally said, with distaste. "I was just
reading your statement."
"There are holes in your story I could drive a truck through." "I can't help
that, it's the only story I've got. What kind of story did you get from Sascha?"
"A short one." Ellis stood and began to pace. "He woke up, sensed a strange mind
in the building, and came downstairs to find you sneaking out of Chrysalis's
office."
"I didn't sneak," Jay said. "I sneak very well, I majored in sneaking in
detective school, but on this particular occasion I didn't happen to be
sneaking. And there's nothing strange about my mind, thank you. So you don't
have a thing on Elmo yet?"
"What do you know about Elmo?" Ellis asked. "Short guy," Jay said.
"Strong guy," Ellis mused. "Strong enough to smash a woman's head into blood
pudding, maybe."
"Real good," Jay said, "only wrong. Elmo was devoted to the lady. Utterly. No
way he'd hurt her."
Her laugh was hard and humorless. "Ackroyd, you may be the world's chief
authority on philandering husbands, but you don't know much about killers. They