Where There's Smoke полностью

I dropped Maria off at her apartment, and then drove three blocks west to one of the entrances to the road that ran through the park. As Henry had suggested, I began thinking over the information he’d given me, but I failed to come up with any sort of inspiration, brilliant or other­wise. The first possibility I examined was what I chose to call the Five Thief Theory, for lack of a better label. The Five Thief Theory worked on the premise that a thief dri­ving a red-and-white Volkswagen bus had entered Abner’s mortuary at three in the morning and stolen An­thony Gibson’s corpse, while at different places within a twenty-block radius, four other thieves (working inde­pendently and without knowledge of each other or of the thief who’d stolen Gibson’s body) were breaking into four separate funeral parlors from which they took noth­ing. Even though I knew the important role coincidence played in the resolution of seemingly baffling crimes, I dismissed this theory as too far-fetched.

It seemed to me that the five break-ins had to be linked. The thief had to have been looking for something he couldn’t find in the first four funeral parlors, and only later found at Abner’s. But if he’d been looking for some­thing specific, and in this instance, the something specific seemed to have been Anthony Gibson’s embalmed body, then why had he later dropped it off in a vacant lot? It didn’t make sense.

Without warning, something suddenly smashed into my windshield. My instant reaction was to duck away from what might become a deadly fusillade, cutting the wheel sharply at the same time, swerving up onto the grass bank beyond the shoulder of the road, and hurling myself flat on the front seat. Nothing else came. I waited a respectable three minutes and then lifted my head and peeked up at the windshield. The glass hadn’t imploded, it hung in a spiderweb pattern to the metal frame. There was no bullet hole at the center of the web. Instead, there was a whitish powdery circle about three inches in diam­eter. Had someone thrown a rock at the car? I crawled across the front seat and opened the door opposite the wheel; if someone was gunning for me (even with rocks), he’d expect me to get out on the driver’s side.

A crow was lying on the hood of the car.

He wasn’t dead, but he certainly wasn’t in the best of health after his recent collision with the windshield. His yellow beak kept opening and closing spasmodically, his wings and claws jerked as he fought unconsciousness. Birds do not appeal to me. I’d once written a letter to Al­fred Hitchcock telling him so. Hitchcock never answered. I now debated what to do with this winged intruder who’d smashed my windshield and who now lay gasping for life on the hood of my car. Would my collision insur­ance cover the cost of a new windshield?

“How’d the accident happen, mister?”

“Well, a bird hit the windshield.”

“A what?”

“A bird.”

“Birds don’t hit windshields, mister. Birds are very fast and very smart.”

I looked down at the very dumb, slow bird. What was I supposed to do with him? Send him flowers and get-well cards? Feeling an enormous sense of guilt, I went back to the trunk, unlocked it, and located the cardboard carton containing flares, a flashlight, a set of highway tools, skid chains, and a box of cartridges for my .38 De­tective’s Special. I emptied the carton, went back to the front of the car, and gently eased the bird into it, figuring I’d leave bird and box safe and snug in the copse of trees lining the road. But suppose something in there decided to eat the damn bird before he was fully recovered? Swearing, I put the carton on the front seat and slammed the door. Then I went back to the trunk, took a wrench from the tool kit, came back to the front of the car, and broke out the windshield so I’d be able to see on the way home. The half-mile ride back to my apartment was breezy and cacophonous, the wind roaring in over the hood, the bird twitching and making croaking little sounds from inside the carton. He was still semi­conscious when I carried him into the apartment at twenty minutes to four. Lisette came out of the kitchen, drying her hands on a dishtowel.