The Love Song of J. Edgar Hoover Paperback - 1997 - 0345415094th Edition

Excerpt

It was New Year's Day. I stood at the kitchen window sipping a hot, bitter espresso and gazing down at the raw, grainy, half-deserted, fog-shrouded countenance of Vandam Street. It looked a lot like I felt. On this day in 1953 Hank Williams had died somewhere along the way to a show in Canton, Ohio. Whether death is indeed preferable to doing a show in Canton, Ohio, has been a much disputed philosophical question ever since. About the only thing I could say for sure was that Hank Williams had been dead almost as long as I'd been alive, and the older I got the more he seemed to be catching up with me.

The cat sat smugly on the windowsill, smiling at a pigeon on the other side of the glass.

"You're probably a big fan of Hank Williams, Jr.," I said, on a thinly disguised note of facetiousness.

The cat said nothing. She looked at me calmly for a moment, blinked several times, then returned her gaze to the pigeon.

I drank some more espresso and watched the fog. Facetiousness, I reflected, was one of the many elements of subtlety that was most assuredly lost upon cats. It was also, of course, lost upon Hank Williams, Jr. But that wasn't entirely his fault....

I was contemplating the rather ludicrous notion of a man-and-cat suicide pact when the phones rang. There are two phones in the loft, on opposite sides of my desk. Both of them are red and both of them are connected to the same line in order to enhance the importance of any incoming wounded I may receive. Neither of them had rung in my recent memory. I walked across the kitchen and over to the desk and picked up the blower on the left.

"Start talkin'," I said.

"My name is Polly Price," said a husky voice. It was a woman I didn't know. As I reached inside the porcelain head of Sherlock Holmes for a cigar, I tried to think of a woman I could really say I did know.

"Polly want a private investigator?" I said hopefully.

"As a matter of fact," she said, "I do."

To calm the wild beating of my heart, I lopped the butt off my cigar and lit it with a kitchen match, always keeping the level of the flame slightly below the tip of the cigar. In my narrow experience as a country singer turned amateur detective, I'd had very few real live, honest-to-God, walk-in-off-the-streets clients. One of the reasons for this was that it was impossible to walk in off the street through the front doors of the building to get to my fourth-floor loft unless you stood out on the sidewalk and hollered loud enough to get my attention, whereupon I would toss you down the little black puppet head with the key wedged tightly into its friendly, ingenuous smile.

"Hello. Are you there?"

"Yes," I said. "How did you hear about us?" I glanced briefly at the cat. She had moved over to the kitchen table by now and seemed to be taking a bit more interest in the situation.

"I'd rather not discuss anything about the case over the phone," she said.

"Of course not," I said, puffing understandingly on the cigar. The woman was probably a little out of touch with the mother ship.