Memory (Hard Case Crime) (46 page)

The policeman shrugged. “Sorry,” he said.

“Well...thank you.”

“Quite all right.”

Cole turned away, and started for the door, and the policeman said, “Wait a second.”

Cole looked around at him.

The policeman said, “Your memory’s bad, huh?”

“I guess so.”

“You ever get picked up, maybe just wandering around not knowing where you were?”

Cole thought of the detective in Deerville. “I guess I was picked up one time, yes.”

“Well, I never heard of anybody using a piece of shiny metal, but maybe so. I’ve seen it done with a glass, that’s all. You know, a drinking glass, offer the suspect a glass of water.”

“Why?”

“To get his fingerprints. You know, you don’t want to book him, or you don’t want to get him so worried he’ll fly the coop if you’re just checking him out, so instead of going through the whole rigmarole with the ink, you just get his fingerprints on something. A highly polished piece of smooth metal, now, that would do that trick.”

“To get my fingerprints.” Cole was holding his canvas bag in his left hand; he raised his right hand palm upward and looked at the tips of his fingers.

“Sure,” said the policeman. “To find out who you are.”

“To find out who I am.” Cole smiled with one side of his face. “That’s funny,” he said.

“Is it?” The policeman was watching him with his flat eyes.

“Yes, it is. It’s really very funny.” Cole turned away, nodding, looking at his fingertips. “Very very funny,” he murmured, and went outside, and turned left, and continued on to the hotel.

It was a small grimy hotel, and he could get a room without bath for three dollars a day. He paid for one night, left his canvas bag in the room, went back downstairs, and asked the clerk did he know if the tannery was looking for workers. The clerk said he thought Cole would have better luck at the plastics plant, and gave him directions to get there.

At the plant, a girl told him to sit on that bench over there and wait. Sitting there, he patted his shirt pocket, looking for his cigarettes, but on the bus he’d switched them to his overcoat pocket. He reached in the wrong pocket of the overcoat first, and pulled out a folded sheet of paper which he at first didn’t recognize. He put it down on the bench beside him, and got his cigarettes out, and then opened the sheet of paper to see what it was. It said:

Edna

Malloy

542 Charter St.

Black Jack

Bellman

Cole’s Tavern

He put the paper down and tried to get a cigarette out of the pack, but his hands were trembling and the pack spurted away, cigarettes flying out and rolling around on the floor like little white bodies. He got down on his knees and picked them all up again, stuffing them back into the pack. Then he took the piece of paper and wadded it up and carried it across the room and dropped it in the wastebasket beside the desk.

“I wouldn’t have been happy there anyway,” he said. He could have cried then, at last, but the girl was coming back.

Gripping Suspense From Donald E. Westlake’s Legendary Alter Ego

by
RICHARD STARK

When he’s not pulling heists with his friend Parker, Alan Grofield runs a small theater in Indiana. But putting on shows is expensive and jobs have been thin, which is why Grofield agrees to listen to Andrew Myers’ plan to knock over a brewery in upstate New York.

Unfortunately, Myers’ plan is insane—so Grofield walks out on him.
But Myers isn’t a man you walk out on...

R
AVES FOR
‘LEMONS NEVER LIE’:

“This first-rate hard-boiled mystery...reads like Raymond Chandler with a dark literary whisper...of Cormac McCarthy.”

— Time

“The prose is clean, the dialogue laced with dry humor, the action comes hard and fast.”

—
George Pelecanos

“Lemons Never Lie
is a delight—a crime story that leaves you smiling.”

—
Washington Post

“The best Richard Stark ever.”

—
Paul Kavanagh

Available now at your favorite bookstore. For more information, visit
www.HardCaseCrime.com