Dan O'Shea - Penance
Здесь есть возможность читать онлайн «Dan O'Shea - Penance» весь текст электронной книги совершенно бесплатно (целиком полную версию без сокращений). В некоторых случаях можно слушать аудио, скачать через торрент в формате fb2 и присутствует краткое содержание. Год выпуска: 2013, Издательство: Osprey Publishing, Жанр: Триллер, на английском языке. Описание произведения, (предисловие) а так же отзывы посетителей доступны на портале библиотеки ЛибКат.
- Название:Penance
- Автор:
- Издательство:Osprey Publishing
- Жанр:
- Год:2013
- ISBN:нет данных
- Рейтинг книги:3 / 5. Голосов: 1
-
Избранное:Добавить в избранное
- Отзывы:
-
Ваша оценка:
- 60
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
Penance: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация
Предлагаем к чтению аннотацию, описание, краткое содержание или предисловие (зависит от того, что написал сам автор книги «Penance»). Если вы не нашли необходимую информацию о книге — напишите в комментариях, мы постараемся отыскать её.
Penance — читать онлайн бесплатно полную книгу (весь текст) целиком
Ниже представлен текст книги, разбитый по страницам. Система сохранения места последней прочитанной страницы, позволяет с удобством читать онлайн бесплатно книгу «Penance», без необходимости каждый раз заново искать на чём Вы остановились. Поставьте закладку, и сможете в любой момент перейти на страницу, на которой закончили чтение.
Интервал:
Закладка:
Dining room — table, six chairs, sideboard, built-in corner hutch, some dishes there. White cabinets in the kitchen. Not much food. Not much anything. Floors clean enough to do surgery on.
Just the bed and the dresser in the master bedroom, bed perfectly made. Wedding photo on the dresser. Helen had been a looker back in the day, a little Hedy Lamarr vibe going. Another Bible, smaller one, pages and cover pretty worn. Crucifix over the bed.
A number of old pictures lined the hall outside the bedroom. The husband, mostly. Even one of him with Hurley the First, the mayor’s grandfather, the first Hurley to stake out the fifth floor at City Hall. He’d ridden his Southside Irish Bridgeport connections to the top prize back in 1952. Hurley the Third had the fifth floor now. Better than fifty years in the Hurley line and no end in sight.
Couple of pictures of Eddie Sr in his hard hat. Blue, with the city seal on it. Streets and Sanitation guy. Picture of Eddie Sr in his Knights of Columbus getup, with the cape and the Three Musketeers hat. Picture of Eddie Sr with the Cardinal. Eddie looking older in the last two, Lynch betting the ALS had already kicked in before the last one was taken.
Bedroom in the back must have been Eddie Jr’s. Old Cubs pennant on the wall, picture of Ernie Banks. Bears’ spread on the bed. Picture on the dresser, Eddie maybe thirty years and ninety pounds ago, standing in a football uniform. Scrapbook. Lynch picked it up. Eddie as a baby. Eddie holding up a fish on a pier somewhere. First Communion picture, Eddie and the parents standing on the steps where Lynch had seen the body. Graduation shots, high school and college. Wedding shots — all three wives. First one with the tux, the next two just suit and tie. Newspaper clippings. Eddie making partner at Morgan Stanley twenty years ago. Eddie setting up his own shop. Eddie yukking it up with the current Hurley at some ribbon cutting. Eddie throwing out a first pitch at Comiskey — the old one. Mom was prouder than she let on, prouder than Eddie knew.
An old desk was tucked into a corner in the hallway. Lynch went through it. Checking papers — bank statements, insurance policies, satisfaction of mortgage on the house. All of it pretty vanilla, nothing there. Lynch found a three-hundred-sheet spiral notebook in the center drawer, black cover. A sort of journal, Helen Marslovak’s account of her illness. The diagnosis back in October. Metastasized colon cancer. Deciding pretty much right off not to fight it — no chemo, no surgery — docs having told her there wasn’t much point. Writing about the pain with a kind of gratitude, thankful to know it was coming, to have a chance to put her soul in order. No self-pity that Lynch could sense.
Lynch went to put the notebook back, saw a piece of cardboard in the bottom of the drawer. He pulled it up. On the other side was an eight by ten photo, black and white, Eddie Sr and Hurley the First in the Hurley box at Wrigley, right behind the Cubs on deck circle. Eddie Sr and Hurley were up against the brick wall, leaning on it with their elbows. Ron Santo was standing on the field to the left of the mayor, Don Kessinger over to the right. Son of a bitch, Lynch thought, one of Hurley’s favor shots. Walk into any alderman’s office where the guy’d been around during the first Hurley reign, any mover and shaker in the city, you were gonna see his Wrigley shot. And the ballplayers in the shot, they told it all, in a kind of social ranking system as esoteric as any court ritual at Versailles but one that every politico in Chicago understood. Santo, he was Hurley’s favorite, even more so than Ernie Banks, because Santo was a white guy, and Hurley the First, he didn’t have much use for Schwartzers. Not racism of the white-supremacist type. Just he liked the balance of power the way it was, and the way it was when he took over left the blacks pretty much out of it. You’d see Ernie in a lot of the shots. Ernie had just enough step’n’fetchit in his act to keep Hurley happy. He was the only black guy you’d see, though. Never saw Billy Williams, never saw Fergie Jenkins. If you had Ernie and Santo, that was top drawer. Lynch’s old man had a Wrigley shot, Santo and Huntley, which was hot shit, too. But Lynch’s old man had hauled a lot of water for the Hurley family in his day. Now here’s Marslovak, Streets and San line grunt as far as Lynch could tell, and he’s got Santo and Kessinger? Lynch peeled the photo off the cardboard backing. Date from the developer on the back. July 1971. All these other shots out on the walls, what was this doing face down in the bottom of a desk drawer?
Lynch found an empty manila envelope in the center drawer and tucked the photo inside. Time to drive out to River Forest, to see Uncle Rusty.
CHAPTER 9 — CHICAGO
March, 1971
Detective Declan Lynch couldn’t decide. The watch commander told him Riley wanted him on the case, which meant the mayor wanted him on the case, and that was good. But the stiffs were the mayor’s kid and one of the mayor’s go-to guys, which, if Lynch didn’t solve this quick, would be bad.
Wasn’t hard to decide about the crime scene, though. The crime scene was a mess.
There was a lot of blood, and not much of it left in the bodies. Stefanski was spread-eagle on the floor, naked except for what was left of a Dago T. There was a shirt on the floor by his head, a pair of pants in the pool of blood next to him, more clothes strewn all over. The fire ax someone had used on him was still buried in his chest — looked like it was buried all the way into the floor. Stefanski’s chest was completely open, chunks of meat and rib sticking out. Lynch could even see his spine in a spot. He’d taken a good whack or two to the head as well. Just enough face left to know it was him. Must have thrashed around quite a bit — blood was smeared all around his body, smeared on his arms and legs, like he rolled over a time or two. Guess you would, Lynch thought, guy’s chopping you up with an ax. Lynch could see several spots where the ax had bit into the floor.
Junior Hurley was in his shorts, sprawled on the floor at the base of a big wing chair across the room. The top of his head was gone, a bloody wad of skull, hair, and brain lying between the rest of the body and the wall. Some blood on the chair, lots of blood on the floor, Hurley’s blood flowing over to mix with the smeared mess around Stefanski. Blood on the walls, too, where somebody’d used it to write BUTCHER THE PIGS. On the other wall, near Stefanski, RAPES THE PEOPLE. A bloody tie was wadded up on the floor near the graffiti. Must have been what was used for a paintbrush.
Footprints in the blood, too. At least three different shoes that Lynch could see. That diamond pattern on those Converse shoes a lot of kids were wearing. A bigger set, looked like boots of some kind. Something smooth-soled that was smeared around pretty good. Converse guy got around. Lynch could see his prints fading out toward the dining room. Looked like boot guy was the poet — good clear set of his prints by the wall next to Junior where the writing was.
A lot of shit smashed on the floor — a lamp in a mess of pieces, books thrown around, Hurley’s briefcase dumped out, the papers everywhere.
Lynch turned to the uniform watching the door. “Whole place trashed like this?”
“Yeah. We swept the joint when we got here, just making sure it was empty. Not much blood once you get by here, couple footprints in the dining room, but they ripped everything up pretty good.”
“Like they were looking for something?”
“Could be,” said the uniform. “More like they just wanted to. You get to the john, you’ll see somebody ripped off the toilet seat and hung it over the light fixture. What’s the point in that?”
Читать дальшеИнтервал:
Закладка:
Похожие книги на «Penance»
Представляем Вашему вниманию похожие книги на «Penance» списком для выбора. Мы отобрали схожую по названию и смыслу литературу в надежде предоставить читателям больше вариантов отыскать новые, интересные, ещё непрочитанные произведения.
Обсуждение, отзывы о книге «Penance» и просто собственные мнения читателей. Оставьте ваши комментарии, напишите, что Вы думаете о произведении, его смысле или главных героях. Укажите что конкретно понравилось, а что нет, и почему Вы так считаете.