The Albemarle Affair - C. M. Albrecht (best fantasy books to read .TXT) 📗

bonus?” Keely asked.
“Well…”
After a lengthy argument that soon became as
complicated as the Israeli-Palestine peace talks, it
came down to Edie's regular restaurant wages —
with two meals a day each — for two weeks' work
followed by some vague talk of a 'nice' bonus — if
the detectives were successful in handing over the
perpetrator. Ayoobi continued to refuse to allow
himself to be pinned down to a specific figure.
Never one to say yes on the first date, Keely
kept at Ayoobi for twenty minutes more until finally
she managed to browbeat the commitment of a firm
one thousand dollar bonus out of him, and an
endorsement — if they caught the thief and put a
stop to the theft within their allotted two weeks.
“Plan to get lung cancer from all that cigar
smoke,” Keely said when they were back down on
the baking street walking toward their car.
“The cancer doesn't worry me nearly as much as
you do. Promising to catch the thief in two weeks,”
Parker said. His lean face showed his
apprehension. “I just don't know, Keelio.”
“Hey, what have we got to lose?” she asked.
“We can give the job a couple of weeks and still
come out all right. After all, this is our first case,
Park. This is our chance to show what we've got —
and unless you know something I don't know — we
haven't got anything else going right now, so as I
say, what have we got to lose? At least we'll be
getting paid over the next two weeks. After all we
have an office now. That costs money. We’ve got
to generate some kind of income. It's not great, I
admit, but it's a start. Our first real case. Sure, I
know we could fall on our faces…but if we pull this
off, we'll have something positive to use as a
reference. It'll look pretty good to list Edie's as a
satisfied client, won't it? Everybody around town
knows Edie's.”
“Yeah, that would look good. Boy, I haven’t
flipped an egg in a long time,” he said as his
thoughts drifted back to earlier times.
They hit it off the first day Keely came to work in
the cafeteria on J Street. Parker worked as the
morning fry cook — or as he liked to think of himself
— a lean mean frying machine. Parker’s first
glimpse of her took his breath away, and he knew
then and there, even as he flipped eggs over easy
in two egg pans at the same time, that Keely was
the one and only for him. But how was he going to
be able to talk to her?
As to Keely, she thought this string bean was
cute…and interesting, and a little voice told her that
he just could be the one. Of course that was before
she had a clue that behind Parker's innocent and
misleading façade of mild-mannered fry cook lurked
a wannabe crime-fighting private detective.
Parker shook his head to clear it. “It would be
nice to list somebody as a reference,” he agreed,
loosening up a little. “But sometimes you scare me,
Keelio. You sounded very sure of yourself up there
in Ayoobi's office.”
Keely looked at pedestrians who, clutched in the
oppressing grip of the scorching sun, moved like
zombies along the sidewalk. Cooking heat waves
roiled up from the pavement, dazzling her eyes. A
kid walked by, desperately trying to keep up with
his rapidly dissolving ice cream cone.
Keely turned her eyes back to Parker and
opened her hands wide and smiled optimistically.
“Hey, I had to sound sure of myself, Park. You
sounded good, too. It was hard enough to get
anything out of that Ayoobi anyway. If we'd
hemmed and hawed around and said, ‘Well, we'll
try,’ or ‘We'll do the best we can,’do you think for a moment we'd ever have talked him out of the thousand-dollar bonus? He probably would've
decided against hiring us at all.” She straightened
her posture and shrugged. “Anyway, it's a start for
us, and,” she smiled, “we'll be eating and paying
next month’s rent.” Suddenly her smile widened
revealing large white teeth. “Look at the bright
side: we're really in business now. This is what you
wanted. This is what you’ve been dreaming of,
having your own private eye business. Besides,
obviously Ayoobi runs quite a few places in the
area. There'll be other greedy employees and
more dishonesty, that's for sure.” She rubbed her
hands together in anticipation and spoke in a more
dreamy voice, “Our first big case. We're really
detectives, at last. You know, when you first started
talking about being a detective, I thought you were
nuts. I mean, I thought of detectives as either
overweight cops or something people play on TV —
but then…little by little, the idea kind of got hold of me, and now I think I'm as big a nut case as you
are.”
“Yeah,” Parker said. He scratched his head,
smiling, thinking about it. “I think you are at that.”
He laughed as they walked along. “Ever since I
was a kid I was into this stuff. I read all the
detective books I could get my hands on —
especially the realistic private-eye stuff. The real
clincher was when I read about François Vidocq —
that came later, by chance.”
“What's a François Vidocq?”
“Hey, he was the world's first private-eye. Man,
his life makes better reading than most detective
novels. He did it all. He was an ex-con. Before he
became a private detective, he founded the French
Sûreté, and to make it even more romantic, once
he started his own private agency all his employees
were his old ex-con buddies, and the real cops
hated his guts because he was always a jump
ahead of them. He was real, that's the neat part.
Not just the figment of some writer's imagination.”
He paused for a moment and then continued, “I
knew then and there that I had to be a private-eye.
That was for me. I know that when you met me,
you had no idea I was on that track, that I was
going to be a detective, that in reality my spatula
would be a cleverly disguised nine millimeter pistol,
and I'd be a man who, in the face of danger, casts
fear aside like a dirty apron as he becomes flinty-eyed ace private detective, Par—”
“Can it, Hall. You were a fry cook when I met
you. Before you became a flinty-eyed detective,
the most dangerous thing your spatula ever did was
spatter grease on your apron.”
Parker smiled, nodding ruefully. “Yeah, I bet I've
scrambled more eggs than the U.S. Army.” He fell
silent, and then after a moment spoke again, “You
know, that bonus Ayoobi was talking about still
sounds pretty iffy, Keelio. I just hope he doesn't try
to renege on his promise.”
Keely looked up at Parker. “We’ll get it,” she
assured him.
When they reached their old Volvo, a slight
young man with a big smile was finishing up his
wash job.
“Anthony,” Parker said, “how many times have I
told you I don’t have the money to pay for wash
jobs. I really don’t.”
“Oh, that’s all right, Parker. I just like to wash
cars. You can catch up with me when you get a
few big cases under your belt.” He bent and
shoved sponges and towels into an empty pail.
Keely smiled. “Well at least you got to finish the
job this time,” she said.
As they drove off, Anthony stood and watched
them with a big smile on his face. “Detectives,” he
murmured.

Chapter Three

There she was! That woman. Corky's blue eyes
narrowed as she stood on the sidewalk in direct
sunlight, half a block from Edie's and brushed at
the strand of straight dark brown hair that always
fell across her eyes. This had to be more than a
coincidence. Had somebody learned that she and
some of her friends met at Edie's almost every day
after their dance class? What difference would that
make? It was not secret. But lately — well today
was the third time exactly since Corky had become
aware of that woman who was standing across the
street in front of the bank.
Corky casually stuck one hand in the hip pocket
of her jeans while her brown eyes carefully
scanned the busy street. At least the sneakylooking
man wasn't with Ms. X today. Corky's sixth
sense assured her that the woman was watching
her. There was just no doubt about that. But why?
Corky tried to ignore the woman's gaze at first, only
thinking her maybe a little strange. But there was
something about the woman, something about the
way Corky could feel the woman's eyes clinging to
her, watching her and studying her. Something
weird is definitely going on here, Corky thought.
Weird and a little bit scary.
The woman appeared to be maybe forty. She
had a kind of shapeless body covered by a
colorless dress, and her face was sad and dry, a
face that complained about the heartless way life
had treated it, the dissolute face of a drinker
maybe. If Corky had not become so conscious of
the woman's stare, Corky would never have given
her a second glance. The thought that she might
be Corky's mother probably would never have
occurred to her. But occur it did.
Right out of the blue. No one could have been
more surprised than Corky herself.
Crazy?
Of course, it was crazy. Corky knew that. She
knew her mother was dead. She had always
known that, and had absolutely no reason in the
world to think otherwise — and besides, even if by
some miraculous intervention by the hand of God
from on high, Corky's mother somehow did turn up
alive, she certainly would not look anything at all
like this woman. Not a chance!
Although Corky never had a picture of her
natural mother to look at, she nevertheless did
have a very clear picture in her mind of what her
mother would look like, must look like. So, this
whole idea was patently crazy from the start. There
was simply no logical reason in the world for Corky
to have got something like that into her young
head, and she spent long fruitless moments
wondering why and how all this had started in the
first place. Yet somehow, crazy or not, there it was
and in the end, when she stopped and really
thought about it — like it or not — it all sort of fit
together in a weird kind of way.
Even while Corky tried to poo-poo the idea on
the one hand, the poo-pooing did not work on the
other hand, and the matter continued to gnaw at
her. In some crazy way or another it all made
sense no matter what Corky tried to tell herself.
She just had a feeling.
When Corky became old enough to understand,
which is to say when she was about ten, her
parents sat her down and carefully and thoughtfully
explained to Corky that she had been adopted.
They made every effort to explain to her that had
they had the luxury of choosing her rather than just
accept whatever baby the Lord might, in His
wisdom, see fit to give them.

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