Read The Way Some People Die for Free Online Page A

that could have been made of leather.
    Paleface lagged behind me and Judas walked ahead, down a hallway decorated with red, black, and gold striped wallpaper. It looked as if the decorator had been influenced by the Fun House at a carnival. The hallway ended in a door that opened into a bright high-ceilinged room. Judas stood aside to let us pass.
    “Watch your lip with Dowser,” the man behind me said, and reminded my right kidney of his gun.
    A man in a midnight-blue suit was standing with one foot on the brass rail of a twenty-foot bar that took up most of the other side of the room. He made a point of waiting and turning very slowly, as if he could easily take me or leave me alone. Behind the bar a great mirror with an old fashioned gold-scrolled frame hung on the oak wall.It repeated all the contents of the room: the television set built into a grandfather’s clock, the silver-dollar slot machines, the full-size snooker table, the illuminated juke box, the row of French windows in the left-hand wall and the swimming pool beyond them, everything a gentleman needed to entertain his friends if he had any friends. I could see myself, in sports clothes and hatless, with a gunman on either side of me, and the gunmen’s boss approaching across the polished floor. It made me angry. A Channel Island boar’s-head sneered from the wall above the Mauve Age mirror. I sneered back.
    “Trouble, Blaney?”
    “I picked him up in Tarantine’s flat,” Paleface said respectfully. “He claims Joe owes him money.”
    “Him and everybody else. Was it smart to bring him here?”
    “I did what you told me, Mr. Dowser, if anybody showed.”
    “All right,” Dowser answered softly.
    We sized each other up. He was a head shorter than I was, almost as wide in the shoulders, wider in the hips. His double-breasted blue suit made him look almost cubical. His head was a smaller cube topped by straight sandy hair that was trimmed too short in a brush cut. He was forty, perhaps, trying to feel like thirty and almost succeeding. His skin was fresh and boyish, but there was something the matter with his eyes. They were brown and wet and protuberant, as if they had been dipped in muddy water and stuck on his face to dry.
    “Who are you?” he said.
    Having nothing to lose by telling it, I told the truth.
    “That isn’t what he said to me,” Blaney complained. “He said he managed fighters in Pacific Point.”
    “You caught me with my veracity down. When you cock a gun at me it breaks up my conversation.”
    “Talkative,” Dowser said. “You from Pacific Point?” He took a sip from a pewter mug he was holding in his right hand. The liquid it contained looked like buttermilk. He made a buttermilk face. “I’ll have a look at your wallet.”
    I took it out, removed the currency from it to insult him, and handed him the limp sharkskin folder. His dirty-brown eyes bulged over my identification, and his lips moved silently. I noticed that one of his ears curled inward on itself like a misshaped mushroom.
    “You want me to read it to you, Mr. Dowser?”
    His fresh skin turned a shade darker, but he held his anger. He had an actor’s dignity, controlled by some idea of his own importance. His face and body had an evil swollen look as if they had grown stout on rotten meat.
    “So you’re looking for Joey Tarantine. Who you working for, Archer? Or you working for yourself?” He tossed the wallet at me unexpectedly. His motions were fast and trained.
    I caught it, tucked the bills back in, put it away in my pocket. “I’m working for a certain Mrs. Lawrence. Her daughter seems to be traveling with Joe. She’s worried about her daughter.”
    Dowser laughed without showing his teeth. “Now why should she be worried about her daughter? Joe’s a sweet kid. Everybody likes Joe.”
    “I like Joe,” Blaney said. “I like Joe,” Judas repeated. Dowser had made a joke, so they made the same joke over again.
    “And what are you going to do