Читать книгу Dreaming of Babylon - Richard Brautigan - Страница 21

The Morning Mail

Peg-leg walked me out to the front door. He moved quickly and gracefully for a man with a peg-leg. Did I mention that before? I don’t think I did. I should have. It’s kind of interesting: a man with a peg-leg taking care of dead people.

Then I remembered something that I was going to ask him.

“Hey, Peg-leg,” I said. “Did you see that blonde who came out of here a little while ago? She had short hair, a fur coat, real good-looking.”

“Yeah,” he said. “She was here visiting one of my clients: the good-looker that somebody used as a substitute because they couldn’t wait to open their morning mail.”

“What?” I said.

“The letter-opener job.”

“Did you say a letter opener?” I asked.

“Yeah, the girl who was killed with the letter opener. The blonde saw her. She said she thought the girl might be her sister. She read about it in the newspaper but it turned out she was the wrong girl.”

“That’s funny,” I said. “She was crying when she went out the door.”

“I don’t know anything about that but she wasn’t crying when she left me. She was very unemotional. A cold fish,” Peg-leg said.

The letter opener!

Now I remembered.

Sergeant Rink was playing with the letter opener that killed the girl I had just seen Peg-leg drooling over. I knew when Peg-leg first mentioned a letter opener that it rang some kind of bell and this was it. The letter opener was the murder weapon.

A bunch of amateur coincidences for no particular reason, I thought, but they don’t have anything to do with me.

“Good-bye,” I said.

“Don’t forget to bring the gun back tomorrow morning,” Peg-leg said, peg-legging it back into the morgue.