Read Shallow Graves for Free Online

should have told me to hit the pike.“
    Maybe you’re looking for a reason not to take the job.
    “Because I’m still bitter over what Empire did to me?“
    A pause. And maybe over when they did it.
    I thought back to Winningham coming into my office, now Harry’s office, with the jewelry claim. Sign off or sign out. It was Christmas time, two months after a priest and I had buried Beth. My leaving the company, the boozing, a kid on a bike that I nearly turned into a hood ornament—
    John?
    “I’m okay. And you’re probably right. I’ll see you soon, huh?“
    I’ll be here.
    We laughed together as the fishermen below us upped anchor and putted off. I wondered if they could see the rainbow. Or even feel it.

    The apartment house at Number 10 Falmouth Street might still be taken for the single-family town house it probably once was, one of many in a part of the South End where the byways were named after towns on Cape Cod . From the front, the building itself was dull red brick, bowfront rather than bay windows on all three floors, trapezoid lintel blocks over each bowfront section. The front entrance was the height of a ten-step stoop above street level. The elevation of the entrance gave the basement a daylight effect, a separate smaller door leading into it. A low iron railing, painted black, enclosed the front of the house, separating it symbolically from the sidewalk. I say symbolically because there were no bars on the windows, not even across the openings at basement level.
    The South End never quite caught on during the yuppie boom. Back Bay, where I lived in the doctor’s condo, was the first to be renovated, followed by the waterfront around Faneuil Hall and then Beacon Hill below the State House. But there was always a damper on the South End. Too many drugs, too many fires, too many homeless long before they were everywhere. As a result, you had one block of rehabbed town houses straight out of Mary Poppins bordering another block of de-habbed crackhouses straight out of the South Bronx .
    I opened the gate and climbed the steps. Four doorbell buttons, three of them labeled. The front door was locked, but from the handle it looked like a spring job, no bolt. Through a glass panel I could see it was the only secured entry, the staircase to the second floor lying behind an opened, inner door. Probably an internal buzzer system tied into the bell buttons. I was thinking that Empire should be glad it didn’t have the landlord on this one when I remembered the building was owned by the dead woman’s family.
    I examined the bells. The top button was captioned “Dani, M. T.“ Expecting nothing, I tried it and got what I expected. Next was the unlabeled one. Nothing again. Next was “Fagan, S.,“ which I took to be “Sinead,“ the other model Holt had mentioned. Still nothing. The bottom button said “Super.“ A four-unit building probably didn’t need its own superintendent, but landlords had a tendency to own several properties in the same neighborhood and to put the manager up in one of them. I pushed the bottom button and got nothing a fourth time.
    I walked down to the super’s separate entrance and knocked. No answer. I climbed back to sidewalk level and looked up at the building. No shade or drape moved abruptly. I went out the gate, then down the block and around to the alley behind the building.
    A lot of South End houses have postage stamp backyards, with patios off the basement door. This block was more like Back Bay , with the house almost abutting on the alley itself. No parking, maybe ten feet between where the fire escape’s raised last flight would come down and where two big trash cans stood covered against the wall and near the back door.
    The escape itself was black except for rust spots here and there. My eyes followed it up the rear wall. The raised last flight retracted to a landing outside the window on the elevated first 1 floor. The escape then switchbacked to a landing at