Читать книгу Klick's Shorts - Milam Smith - Страница 7

The lady with the Lucy-red hair hit on me while I was sampling John Grisham’s The Testament. Grisham’s writing in Testament was ten-fold better than the atrocious The Street Lawyer. I’m against burning books. Lawyer, though, could make one rethink that position. While the Testament scenes with the Billionaire’s grown children were facile, the protagonist’s character was well-conceived and realistic, especially once the lawyer lands in Brazil.

That is until the last third of the novel. While it rings true - Nate finally recognizing the wreckage of his life, seeing the errors of his ways, finding God - it’s pretty hard to believe a lawyer feeling guilty during gut-shredding depositions, going easy and having compassion.

A lawyer? No frigging way. Even though Grisham himself gives away a ton of his money from his lucrative writing career, you only have to glance at his movie-star blue eyes and see the steel of a shark’s deadly squint. Lawyers are heartless sacks of crap. Only a judge is worse. Or a politician.

Which is the same side the coin.

Obviously, I don’t think much of lawyers, huh?

“That’s Grisham’s newest, isn’t it?” Red asked.

Red had wandered over and sat in the seat opposite me. Her view would be of one of the Bass towers and the marquee for the Palace theater. Another Bass enterprise. They’d stolen the name of an old Fort Worth landmark and perverted it by squeezing several movie screens into three floors of cramped rooms. Chairs too small and stiff, screens too small and too far away.

Red had sat, gazed out the windows, sipping her coffee concoction, ignoring the book in her hand. I felt her doe-brown eyes tickling me. I read on and ignored her. Play hard to get, and maybe they’ll just go away, hopefully putting a future divorce lawyer out of business.

When she finally spoke I just nodded my head in answer.

“Is it any good?” Persistent, she was, as Yoda might say.

“Beats his last one to death. Not one of his best, but his writing is better.” Crap. Ask anyone an opinion and suddenly they’re Shakespeare. I gritted my teeth, shrugged my too-wide shoulders.

“You ask me, there’s not enough law and court scenes in any of those ‘legal thrillers’ that are a dime-a-dozen now thanks to him,” Red said.

“Actually,” I said, lowering the book just enough for her to see my own set of brown eyes, flaked with green, “Turow started the resurgent genre. Grisham just added popcorn and butter to make it palatable to those with the skimpiest of reading ability.”

“Hmmm, you seem to know something about books.”

“I read a lot. Doesn’t mean I know a damn thing,” I told her. I could imagine my brother Frankie saying No shit Sherlock to that.

Her laugh was like silk being dragged over a naked geisha. “You know,” she said between sips of her coffee, “it is so hard to find an honest opinion nowadays. Refreshing.”

“Yeah, know what you mean. Say Clinton’s just a predator with delusions of grandeur - he and Hillary actually think he’s the Messiah - of being the first King of America, and people will think you’re some kind of radical. Guy’s a rapist, a mauler, violently tempered and a plain ol’ jerk. People know it, yet they don’t want to hear it.”

I could see her grappling to control herself. For a moment I thought she might bite the rim off her cup. Finally, she said, “That is so right on.” Again that silky laugh.

Red was most likely the person I’d been hired to ferret out by the store manager, Mr. William Parker Dooley. Or as he called himself, “W. P. Dooley.” Came off my lips as ‘Wimpy Dooley’. Made him blink when I said it.

Dooley had hired me because someone was suspected of seducing customers in his store and then rolling them. I thought his idea silly. But he’d offered me all the books I could read in a year for free. As a P.I., I do a lot of sitting around when on surveillance. That equals a lot of reading. A lot of free books.

I still thought Dooley’s idea was as silly as his name.

So for the past month on my free time I’d come into the store and read. What I started I took home with me. Flash the gold V.I.P. card and it was mine, all mine.

But finally, someone had hit on me. After a month of not being hit on, I had to suspect Red right off. I mean, just hitting on me said something.

“What else do you like to read?” she wondered.

“Anything but romance and books about adultery,” I said.

Again she bit into her cup. I watched her jaw muscles flex like Schwarzenegger’s biceps. Was she tensed by the ‘romance’ or ‘adultery’ jibe.

“Yes, that stuff is so trite. Me, I like anything and everything about the movies. Magazines, books, biographies…all that stuff. I don’t know if I’m suppressing an actor’s ego or just some kind of goofy fan that doesn’t have a life.”

My bet she wasn’t suppressing the ‘actor’ in her. Her act was as smooth as they came. The book in her lap was the Titanic script with pictures and the ‘making-of’ story.

“I was in a movie, once,” I bragged. “Did a little stunt work.”

“Really?!” That perked her up. I told her a little about it.

“So you’re a bodyguard? That’s what you do for a living?”

“When I’m not throwing newspapers,” I lied.

Red was not all that pretty. ‘Cute’ would the be the right term, I guess. A body that would be called plump nowadays, but was actually voluptuous by old standards. Kind of short. The ‘red’ in her hair was suspect, as were the brown eyes. Maybe colored contacts.

That silky laugh was real, though. Women can seduce and fake sex naturally. But her lust was genuine.

I suddenly realized I didn’t know her name. I was used to putting on an act in my job, but I’d never really had to seduce, or allow myself to be seduced before. Gave me a creepy feeling.

But it was a job and somebody had to do it.

“I’m Clyde Klick,” I said, setting the book down and extending a meaty hand across the coffee table intruding between us.

Her handshake was delicate, like a woman’s should be. But I felt the muscle and strength in her hand that she held back.

“I’m Jerri,” she said. “Jerri Fullenpeiter.” She paused, waiting for the retort she’d probably heard since first grade. But I said nothing. With a last name like Klick, I had heard a fair share of distortions of my last name. Kind of funny that I’d ended up a private eye, a ‘Dick’.

“Klick? I kind of like it.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Kind of cool, I always thought.”

We silently shared our little ‘something in common’ in silence, the unusual last names.

“I have a room at the Worthington,” she said. “Would you like to come over and watch Tin Cup with me?”

“One of my favorite flicks,” I said. “Sure.”

Well, she certainly didn’t waste any time. This could be interesting….