"Tom Reamy - That Detweiler Boy" - читать интересную книгу автора (Reamy Tom)

"Bertram, you shouldn't waste your time 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. (Once, a couple of years ago, a young black buck thought an old
fat lady with one eye would make 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 in 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."