Read Online You Can't Kill a Corpse by Louis Trimble - Free Book Online

forward.
    â€œThat guy is doomed to hedges,” he told Bob Morgan when he was back in the car. “Maybe I’ll send a small one to his funeral.”
    â€œWhat was the idea?” Bob Morgan asked.
    â€œLots of reasons,” Clane said. “In the first place, it’s a reminder to our dear mayor of the penalty for playing politics. Also, it might keep the police puzzled long enough to give me room to work in. And they could be just dumb enough not to figure out that he was killed in his own study. I doubt that,” he added sourly. “Now drive home, Bob.”
    â€œMy car is back at Wickett’s,” Bob Morgan said. “Hidden around the corner and up a street.”
    â€œYour father calls on him, why not you?”
    â€œI didn’t want to start a fuss,” he said. “Wickett didn’t know I was calling on Mickey.” He sucked in his breath. “Give me a cigarette, Jim. Jeez! What a mess.”
    Clane said that Bob was standing up fine under it. “Have some potato chips?” he asked. He opened the sack. “Chocolate bar?”
    Bob Morgan gagged. “No—no thanks.”
    Clane said amiably, “Say so if you change your mind.” He ate the chocolate and then the potato chips. He was beginning to feel good again. Things were looking better. Of course it all depended on what Driggs and Edith Morgan had to say.
    They stopped by Bob’s dilapidated Ford. Clane said, “I’ll be at the station tomorrow. Go get some sleep.”
    He could see a crooked grin on Bob Morgan’s white face. “I wish I had your guts, Jim.”
    Clane said, “I’m all gall bladder. Don’t stew about it.”
    He drove off, leaving Bob Morgan standing motionless by his car. Clane headed straight for the Metropole. It was one-fifteen by his watch. He wondered if Edith Morgan would be in his room. And he wondered what she had been doing since leaving Wickett’s. For that matter, how had Natalie and Thorne spent the time since he had left their house? Evidently neither of them had been at Wickett’s, at least not long enough to remove Natalie’s picture from the desk.
    Clane patted his pockets in satisfaction. For what they were worth, he had a few things to show for the night. The cigar case, the picture of Natalie, the clippings on J. B. Castle, and most important, he suspected, the two fifty-dollar bills. He had taken them because of the peculiar markings. They weren’t new bills, nor too old. But on both he had noticed that the zeros in the serial numbers had been blacked out. Much as a person would doodle and fill in the o’s in a sentence. A nice way to mark money if the man taking it weren’t too quick.
    Wickett, he thought, was too quick to take it, so he must have been waiting to give it to someone. Clane himself, maybe. But would a man like Wickett consider a hundred dollars enough money to tempt Clane? He would be shrewder than that, it seemed to Clane. He let it ride for the time being and swung the car into the hotel’s basement garage. He went past a sleepy attendant and up a flight of stairs into the lobby.
    He went to the desk and asked for the key to his room. He said, “Any messages?”
    â€œNo, sir.” The clerk handed Clane the key.
    Clane was watching the clerk’s face. It was still, compressed. Clane stood a moment, fingering the key. “Send it up,” he said softly. He turned and walked away. He brushed against a slim, dark man coming toward the desk. He said, “Sorry.”
    He had a glimpse of black hair shot with gray and combed tightly to a small head, a graying moustache, and two unwinking black eyes that met his own and passed on by. Involuntarily Clane shivered. He had met such eyes before; once he had come off with six stitches in his scalp, another time with a knife wound in his back.
    When Clane was in the elevator, he said, “Who is that good-looking little