Read Straight for Free Online Page B

Regret stabbed in again, a needle of grief.
    Annette came to announce that Mr. Franklin’s room was at least partially clear, so I transferred myself into there to make more phone calls in comparative privacy. I sat in Greville’s black leather swiveling chunk of luxury and put my foot on the typist’s chair June carried in after me, and I surveyed the opulent carpet, deep armchairs and framed maps as in the lobby, and smoothed a hand over the grainy black expanse of the oversized desk, and felt like a jockey, not a tycoon.
    Annette had picked up from the floor and assembled at one end of the desk some of the army of gadgets, most of them matte black and small, as if miniaturization were part of the attraction. Easily identifiable at a glance were battery-operated things like pencil sharpener, handheld copier, printing calculator, dictionary-thesaurus, but most needed investigation. I stretched out a hand to the nearest and found that it was a casing with a dial face, plus a head like a microphone on a lead.
    “What’s this?” I asked Annette, who was picking up a stack of paper from the far reaches of the floor. “Some sort of meter?”
    She flashed a look at it. “A Geiger counter,” she said matter-of-factly, as if everyone kept a Geiger counter routinely among their pens and pencils.
    I flipped the switch from off to on, but apart from a couple of clicks, nothing happened.
    Annette paused, sitting back on her heels as she knelt among the remaining clutter.
    “A lot of large stones change color for the better under gamma radiation,” she said. “They’re not radioactive afterward, but Mr. Franklin was once accidentally sent a batch of topaz from Brazil that had been irradiated in a nuclear reactor and the stones were bordering on dangerous. A hundred of them. There was a terrible lot of trouble because apart from being unsalable they had come in without a radioactivity import license, or something like that, but it wasn’t Mr. Franklin’s fault, of course. But he got the Geiger counter then.” She paused. “He has an amazing flair for stones, you know. He just felt there was something wrong with that topaz. Such a beautiful deep blue they’d made it, when it must have been almost colorless to begin with. So he sent a few of them to a lab for testing.” She paused again. “He’d just been reading about some old diamonds that had been exposed to radium and turned green, and were as radioactive as anything ...”
    Her face crumpled and she blinked her eyes rapidly, turning away from me and looking down to the floor so that I shouldn’t see her distress. She made a great fuss among the papers and finally, with a sniff or two, said indistinctly, “Here’s his desk diary,” and then, more slowly, “That’s odd.”
    “What’s odd?”
    “October’s missing.”
    She stood up and brought me the desk diary, which proved to be a largish appointments calendar showing a month at a glance. The month on current display was November, with a few of the daily spaces filled in but most of them empty. I flipped back the page and came next to September.
    “I expect October’s still on the floor, torn off,” I said.
    She shook her head doubtfully, and in fact couldn’t find it.
    “Has the address book turned up?” I asked.
    “No.” She was puzzled. “It hasn’t.”
    “Is anything else missing?”
    “I’m not really sure.”
    It seemed bizarre that anyone should risk breaking in via the roof simply to steal an address book and a page from a desk diary. Something else had to be missing.
    The Yellow Pages glaziers arrived at that point, putting a stop to my speculation. I went along with them to the packing room and saw the efficient hole that had been smashed in the six-by-four-foot window. All the glass that must have been scattered over every surface had been collected and swept into a pile of dagger-sharp glittering triangles, and a chill little breeze ruffled papers in clipboards.
    “You don’t