[Second Hand Smoke 01] • Second Hand Smoke · Blood on Wolfe's Words

Mona Morgan loved the dingy motels. She wanted nothing of the Marriott or the Double Tree. Room service? Not a chance. There was one service she was concerned with; a service enhanced by the neon ‘Vacancy’ signs, the lumpy beds, the stained coverlets and the two day old sheets. Even the Gideon’s bible – where she could find her sins on feel alone – was a familiarity that fed her contemptuous love.

Contempt! Mona couldn’t remember a man she’d made love to more than three times without learning to hate him. Still, she married five of them, but they never got to be experts on Mona. No man knew Mona. No man understood how she needed the motel rooms, and the bodies, strong and young, old and flabby, married, unmarried. It didn’t matter if it was good sex, bad sex, no difference to Mona. They were cardboard cutouts or blow-up dolls; once they became flesh and blood with feelings and ideas, they became transparent, as if they weren’t there. They weren’t.

Mona Morgan didn’t merely hate men; she hated the concept of men, creatures led by their dicks. Hers was a lifelong high school science lab project where she proved that any man, no matter how much in love with someone else, how rich or poor, how attractive or unattractive, could be seduced. But that was giving a reason to it, and there wasn’t a reason. She’d even forgotten when it began, or who was the first man she’d hated. Maybe it was her father, but no, she couldn’t call up a reason from her muddled past. She stopped rationalizing after the third husband.

Mona Morgan is dead. Was it her husband? What would Nero Wolfe think? Yes, if you know Nero Wolfe well, you’ll capture the essence of the crime early on, but even then, maybe not!