Read Online Crime of Their Life by Frank Kane - Free Book Online Page B

country, he read that Rusty Garsen had been arrested for the murder holdup of old Doc Schwartz, that Barney Ryan’s uniform cap had saved his life and that he was alive to testify against Rusty. Mac, the poolroom owner, was being tried for receiving stolen property.
    Allen kept traveling west, managed to wangle a job as a page boy on the old Panama Pacific Lines. By the time his first voyage through the Canal brought him back to New York, he had discovered the world outside the East Side and had learned that the combination of a boyish smile, exuberant good health and a lonely female passenger with plenty of money could add up to a very pleasant existence.
    It still held true, he conceded, as the round ball of the sun melted behind the horizon.
    Today, although he’d never see fifty again, there were still plenty of women stalking him, but all too often these days it was the basket cases. The junior members of the staff, like Larry Weston, caught the fancy of the younger, more eligible ones.
    Idly, he wondered if Weston might finally hit the jackpot with the Eldridge girl. The kid had been trying hard enough to connect with someone wealthy for the past three or four cruises. This one was the most likely of all, Allen conceded, lonely, grateful and impressed by the rush Weston was giving her. The pay-off would be worth all the work he was putting into it, but even so Allen didn’t envy the kid.
    Just the memory of the girl’s shrill giggle sent chills up and down the cruise director’s spine. And that old man of hers was no pushover. Allen didn’t envy anybody who had to go up against him. He had that cold dignity, the ability to make a man ill-at-ease with a word. He had been around and wasn’t naive enough to think the third officer was giving his daughter a rush for her good looks. He’d seen the cold calculating look in Eldridge’s eyes several times when he was watching Weston and the girl. Anything Weston got out of him he’d have to work for.
    Allen squinted at the horizon. For a hard-boiled, down-to-earth character like Eldridge, his choice of Lew Herrick, the writer, as an almost constant companion was a little out of character. But it was probably attributable to the fact that Herrick and the old movie star were constant companions. Less puzzling was the old man’s immediate acceptance of the newcomer, Johnny Liddell.
    He frowned as the new passenger popped into his head. There was something about Liddell that made him wonder. Maybe it was the fact that Keen had turned so green when he got his first glimpse of him at dinner. Keen had struck him as a pretty cold character, not easy to stampede. There was no question that he had seen Liddell before and was scared of him. That would seem to indicate that the new passenger wasn’t the amiable, easy-going vacationer he tried to portray.
    It bothered Allen not to be able to put the passengers in their rightful niches. He had spotted from the first the fact that the Sands couple were anything but uncle and niece, just as easily as he had been able to see through Lewis Herrick’s pose as a great and insatiable lover. There had been any number like him prancing around in the past ten years, waging a conscious or unconscious fight against a latent homosexuality and cloaking it by trying to prove they were male to the soles of their shoes.
    But Liddell as a type eluded him. After the Landers incident, it was more than curiosity that made Allen want to know more about the newcomer. He seemed interested in Ingrid, he mused, but then so did almost every other male on the ship, eligible or otherwise. He wondered if it would do any good to have Ingrid make a play for Liddell and find out who or what he really was. He had the unhappy conviction that it would be Liddell who would wind the blonde around his finger rather than vice versa. But it might be worth trying.
    Allen sighed, headed for the companionway.
    It was a good thing that he had finally decided that this would