Kathy Hogan Trocheck - Truman Kicklighter 02 - Crash Course Read Online Free Page A

“We tried to call you for a ride. Spent all the money we had. Then we had to walk home. All the way from the beach. Where were you so late?”
    “I went out with a friend after Great Books,” Truman said. “We watched the ball game. It was a late one. The Braves were playing on the West Coast.”
    That much was true. After they’d left Mirror Lake, Truman had suggested they might watch the game at the El Cap. He was still apprehensive about wandering into widows’ lairs.
    It turned out that Margaret McCutchen had never been to his favorite watering hole, the tiny sports bar on Fourth Street that was the nearest thing to a hangout Truman had.
    He had introduced Margaret to Frankie, who was running the place now that Steve and Rose were retired. They ordered a pitcher of Budweiser, and Margaret insisted on paying for half.
    This was a woman he could like, a woman who drank real beer and didn’t mind paying her share. She knew about baseball, too, although she was an American League fan due to growing up in Boston. She could cook, too.
    After the game, she’d invited him over to her place, and he’d gone.
    Margaret lived in a very nice condominium in the old Detweiler Hotel, which had been renovated and was now quite upscale. As promised, her air-conditioning was cool and efficient They’d talked and laughed and gotten to know each other.
    He’d learned that she’d been divorced only six months before her wealthy husband had died, while they were both in their fifties. So, Margaret told him firmly, she was not technically a widow at all. There were no children or grandchildren. She’d been a college physics professor before retirement, liked to sail and travel, had her own money and a late-model Nissan.
    They’d talked until quite late, enjoyed large dishes of her delicious ice cream and healthy slabs of her home-baked pound cake. In fact, a good chunk of that pound cake was upstairs, wrapped in foil on his dresser. He would have it for his late-afternoon treat.
    “A friend?” Jackie said. “Like, a date?”
    “It wasn’t a date, dammit,” Truman said. The eggs were cold and greasy, and his biscuit was burned on the bottom. “But what if it was? Anything wrong with that?”
    “None of my business,” Jackie said. She went over to the coffee station and got the pot of coffee that had finished brewing. As a peace offering, she went in the kitchen and grabbed some biscuits that had just come out of the oven, and tucked Truman’s strawberry jam in the basket, covering it with a napkin.
    When she got back to the table, Truman had his head buried in the sports section. She poured his coffee, but didn’t leave.
    “Brought you some more biscuits. And some jelly. Aren’t you going to say ‘I told you so’?”
    He took a sip of coffee. “I told you so. Where’s the car now?”
    “Ollie helped me push it into a gas station,” Jackie said. And then her words came out in a torrent. “I couldn’t help it. That car and me were meant to be. A red Corvette, Mr. K. And I got a great price on it. You should have seen me driving around, guys looking at me, women giving me the evil eye ‘cause I looked so hot. Until it started making a funny noise and it stopped dead where it was.”
    “A Corvette?” Truman dropped his newspaper on the floor. “I thought you told me you were going to look at a Gremlin. A six-hundred-dollar AMC Gremlin. What happened?”
    She told him everything. About how hot and smelly the bus had been, and how the salesman, Jeff Cantrell, made her such a good offer, and how they’d financed it right there, and how they didn’t even do a credit check because they were in the business of helping people buy cars.
    “Ollie said maybe it was something simple that went wrong, like a spark plug or something,” she said.
    “He wouldn’t know a spark plug from a bathtub plug,” Truman said ungraciously. “Have you got a contract, or anything like that?”
    “In my purse. In the kitchen,”