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Terry Davis in the shower.
A mummified body in a trunk. If you want to feel nauseous, think of a stinking, mummified body.
But (a) mummies don’t stink. They look like leather statues, but they don’t smell, (b) mummies are bodies that have gone through some sort of preservation process. They gut them, I think I remember from sixth grade, and then fill the cavity with some kind of preservatives-or was it rocks? sand? — and then wrap them in linen.
The body in this weirdo’s trunk might have been dried out after a year, but, technically speaking, it wasn’t mummified. After a year, why wasn’t it a skeleton? Wouldn’t the flesh have completely decomposed-giving off one hell of a stink-in a year?
There is a lot you don’t know about bodies. And ergo sum, a sergeant of the Homicide Bureau should know a lot about dead bodies.
Maybe I can take a course at the university.
Not a bullshit undergraduate course, but a course at the medical school. Amy’s a professor. She should (a) know and (b) have the clout to have her little brother admitted.
Christ, I’m going seventy-five in a fifty-five zone!
Sorry to be speeding, Officer. What it was, when I passed the Crossroads Diner, was that I naturally recalled my girlfriend with the back of her head blown out in the parking lot…
Terry Davis has long legs. Nice long legs.
Why do long legs turn me on?
Why do some bosoms, but not others, turn me on?
Why did Terry Davis turn me on like that?
She really does have nice legs.
And she smelled good, too.
He recognized where he was. What he thought of as “the end of Straight 611 out of Doylestown.” The concrete highway turned into macadam, made a sharp right turn, then a sharp left turn, and then got curvy.
Right around the next curve is where we pick up the old canal.
I’ll be damned! I’m not going to throw up.
And I’m not sweat-soaked.
Thank you, God!
He made the left turn and shoved his foot hard against the accelerator.
FOUR
Johnny Cassidy’s Shamrock Bar was on The Hill in Easton, near-and drawing much of its business from-Lafayette College. Even at four in the afternoon, there were a lot of customers, mixed students and faculty and other staff of the college.
Matt took a stool at the bar and ordered a beer, a pickled egg, and a Cassidy Burger-“Famous All Over The Hill”- and struck up a conversation with the bartender, who had a plastic nameplate with a shamrock and “Mickey O’Neal Manager” printed on it pinned to his crisp, white, open-collar, cuffs-rolled-up shirt. Matt thought he was probably thirty-five or forty, and was not surprised that he was talkative.
When Matt asked how Johnny Cassidy was, O’Neal shook his head sadly and said the Big C had gotten him, five, no six, months before. Johnny kept feeling tired, and he finally went to the doctor, and six weeks later he was dead. Died the same week as his mother, in fact.
“So what’s going to happen to the bar?”
“It’s going to stay open,” Mickey O’Neal said, firmly, and then went on to explain that he’d worked in the place for fifteen years before Johnny died, starting out as an afternoon bartender and working his way up to assistant manager, and got to know him real well. Johnny had been godfather to two of his kids. “They called him Uncle Johnny.”
When Johnny knew his time was up, he made a deal with Mickey and his brother-Johnny’s younger brother, nice guy, who’s a cop in Philadelphia, and who had cared for their mother until she died; Johnny had never married-which gave twenty-five percent of the place to O’Neal and the rest to his brother.
“We’re talking about me buying him out, over time, you know, but right now, I’m just running the place for the both of us. Once a month, I write him a check for his share of what we make. It’s a pretty good deal all around. The bar stays open, which means I have a job, and his brother gets a check-a nice check, I don’t mind saying-once a month. Which is nice, too. Johnny figured he owed his brother-did I say he’s a cop in Philly? — for taking care of their mother all those years.”
There were now answers to the questions raised by what Detective Payne had learned at the Northampton County Court House: Seven months before, for one dollar and other good and valuable consideration, all assets, real estate, inventory and goodwill of the property privately held by John Paul Cassidy at 2301 Tatamy Road, Easton, had been sold to the Shamrock Corporation. The building at 2301 Tatamy Road housed both Johnny Cassidy’s Shamrock Bar and, above it, four apartments on two floors.
