Michael Beeson's Research

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consider judicious chicken

Consider judicious chicken

After a long silence he said,“Okay. All right. I’ll be there.” There it was established that the blood was not, as the porter at the Ambassador had first imagined, from a quarried deer, a goose or chicken whose throat had been slit and which someone had been transporting in the taxi, but the blood of someone shot just a few hours previously; they also found the two bullets that had gone through Mortimer’s body and penetrated the car’s bodywork; and Haintl, having been told to leave the car at the police station, was driven, accompanied by two detectives, first to the Brandeis garage and, since the only person there was the car washer, on to Sponer’s flat. In the meantime the Brandeis familywere alarmed, but of course knew nothing. One of the detectives rang the front doorbell; the door was opened and, accompanied by the startled porter, they mounted the stairs, woke up the Oxenbauers, and entered Sponer’s room. What with the examination of the blood-stained interior of the car at the police station and everything else, it was, by then, gone two in the morning. ‘Why aren’t you answering your phone?’ “No. Under the fingernails of his other hand there were still pieces of his own skin and flesh.” “After my father was murdered it was the only thing I could do.” I get up in slow motion from this limitlessly soft chair with broken springs. I feel like grabbing D?rfinna by the neck and calling her a witch of a midwife. ‘Dessie,’ said Hickey, pumping the senator’s hand with both of his. McGee didn’t need to introduce himself. We both knew who he was. Hickey jerked a thumb at me. ‘This is Tristram St Lawrence,’ he told the table. ‘He’s the brains.’ We sat there next to each other in the bright white room, lost in our own thoughts about reality and truth. The flesh around Rash’s eyes crinkled with the attempt to understand but I was dead set on not kissing him — or any other man. Near the end ofLife Among the Savages by Shirley Jackson— a writer most remembered for her story about a civic group of people stoning to death their fellow citizen — the narrator is expecting her fourth child; her children and husband are asking after the not-yet-born baby daily; the narrator is trying to get a reprieve from the topic. “I took mycoffee into the dining room and settled down with the morning paper. A woman in New York had had twins in a taxi. A woman in Ohio had just had her seventeenth child. A twelve-year-old girl in Mexico had given birth to a thirteen-pound boy. The lead article on the woman’s page was about how to adjust the older child to the new baby. I finally found an account of an axe murder on page seventeen, and held my coffee cup up to my face to see if the steam might revive me.” You think so? “It’s not unknown for tribal enemies to take a body part as a trophy,” Duncan ventured. He stared at her and, still holding the receiver behind his back, groped around, missing the cradle each time, but finally he just let it drop anyhow. “He had none any more! He was through! And if he wasn’t a criminal himself, he lived off the crimes of others! He sold stolen stocks and shares, he was in cahoots with crooks and I don’t know what else! He was in no danger of getting into trouble with the police, that’s for sure! Whom do the police go after over there do you think? Gangsters? They wouldn’t dare. But he did seem to run the risk of getting into trouble with his own kind, the crooks. Let’s face it, it’s the gangsters themselves who bump off one another, isn’t it?” The major nodded and slipped over the rail. God, I’ve never heard anything more funny and pathetic. What sorry excuses for addicts. consider judicious chicken.