by Terry Mort
“I understand.”
“She’s so beautiful, I’m not even jealous.”
“You don’t need to take any back seats.”
“I know. When you’re really beautiful, you can be fair, you know? Like me. It’s the ones who are not so beautiful that are bitchy.”
She looked at Bunny’s Rolls.
“What a pretty car. Do you know what I heard him say just now? He was talking to Manny, so the subject naturally came around to money. Money and schtupping is all Manny thinks about. Anyway, this guy Bunny—and who goes by Bunny, by the way?—he said his old English maiden aunt left him twenty thousand pounds. How much is that in real money? It sounds like a lot, but it might not be.”
“It’s a lot. I think the exchange rate is about five dollars to the pound.”
“So you multiply five times twenty thousand?”
“Yep.”
“Wow. He’s lucky to have a dead aunt like that.”
“Isn’t he.”
She looked at me beneath her astonishing eyelashes. Her green eyes were all innocence.
“Do you believe it?”
“Believe what?”
“That story.”
“About the dead aunt?”
“Yes.”
“Why do you ask?”
“Oh, you know, when you’re schtupping a big-time producer and you got a gangster on the side, you hear things.”
“I’ll bet.”
“Well?”
Did I believe it?
Sure. Sure I did.
Also by Terry Mort
NON-FICTION:
The Wrath of Cochise
The Hemingway Patrols
Thieves’ Road
The Reasonable Art of Fly Fishing
FICTION:
At Last!
The Fox and the Hedgehog
The Voyage of the Parzival
Showdown at Verity
The Lawless Breed
EDITED ANTHOLOGIES:
Mark Twain on Travel
Jack London on Adventure
Zane Grey on Fishing
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Terry Mort is a graduate of Princeton University and the University of Michigan. After graduate school he served as an officer in the navy. He is the author of numerous books, both fiction and non-fiction, most recently The Wrath of Cochise. He divides his time between Arizona and Colorado.
THE MONET MURDERS
Pegasus Books LLC
80 Broad Street, 5th Floor
New York, NY 10004
Copyright © 2015 by Terry Mort
First Pegasus Books edition September 2015
Interior design by Maria Fernandez
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in whole or in part
without written permission from the publisher, except by reviewers who may
quote brief excerpts in connection with a review in a newspaper, magazine,
or electronic publication; nor may any part of this book be reproduced, stored
in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or other, without written permission
from the publisher.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
ISBN: 978-1-60598-697-5
ISBN: 978-1-60598-752-1 (e-book)
Distributed by W. W. Norton & Company