A Romantic Way to Die Read Online Free PDF Page A

the dresser was open about a quarter of an inch. The door to a tiny closet stood open, and Rhodes could see clothes hanging inside.
    He looked over at the window screen. It was crooked, as if it had been opened and carelessly shut.
    Henrietta Bayam was lying on the floor. Her head was near the dresser, and her neck was turned at an odd angle. There was a small pool of blood under her head. Rhodes stepped into the room and bent down over Henrietta. There was no question in his mind that she was dead, but he felt for a pulse nevertheless. There was none, of course. Henrietta’s flesh felt only slightly cool to his touch.
    Rhodes stood up and sighed.
    “Let’s go back around to the front,” Rhodes said. “I have a few calls to make before I talk to anyone else.”
    He and Chatterton walked back through the clammy grass and crossed the yellow rectangles.
    “It won’t take long,” Rhodes said when they reached the front. “You can just wait here.”
    Chatterton stood outside the dormitory while Rhodes got Hack on the radio and asked him to send out Ruth Grady to do a crime-scene investigation of the room.
    “Send the justice of the peace, too,” he said. “I’ll have Ruth call for the ambulance later.”
    “Ten-four,” Hack said.
    Rhodes got out of the car and walked over to where Chatterton was waiting patiently.
    “All right,” he said. “Let’s go in.”
    Chatterton didn’t say a word, just turned and went back into the dormitory. Rhodes followed him.
    As soon as they got inside, Rhodes knew what Chatterton had meant about distraction. There were at least thirty women crammed into the dormitory’s sitting room. Some of them were dressed, some of them were half-dressed, and some of them were wearing robes. All of them were talking at once. Rhodes had no idea how any of them could make out what the others were saying. He certainly couldn’t.
    He looked at Chatterton, who shrugged, raised his eyebrows, and held up his palms.
    Rhodes wished he had a police whistle, but he’d never needed one before and didn’t carry one around. He thought for a second that he might have to fire his pistol to get their attention, but it turned out not to be necessary. Someone else was better equipped for the situation than Rhodes was.
    There was a shrill, piercing blast, and the room got quiet immediately. Rhodes looked to the side of the room to see a very short woman, shorter than Chatterton, putting a police whistle on a silver chain back into her purse.
    “I always carry one,” she said in a New York kind of voice. “You never know when you’ll need help, and they’re good for hailing taxis.”
    “And you are?” Rhodes said.
    “Jeanne Arnot. And you?”
    “I’m the sheriff. Dan Rhodes.”
    “Where’s your badge?”
    Rhodes always wore civilian clothes, and his badge was clipped to his belt. He pulled it off and held it up so that everyone could see it.
    “Well, it’s about time you got here,” Jeanne said. “New York’s finest would have been on the scene in under five minutes.”
    “He had to come from Clearview,” Vernell Lindsey said in Rhodes’s defense. “It’s a long way.”
    Vernell was wearing a pink robe and pink slippers. In fact, Rhodes noticed, pink was the dominant theme in sleeping attire for the entire crowd. Jeanne Arnot was wearing gray slacks, but she had on a pink blouse, and two women wore pink dresses. One woman had on fuzzy pink bunny slippers. Rhodes couldn’t remember having seen anything quite like them.
    “Long way or not, there’s a dead woman in that room back there,” Jeanne said, and by the time she’d finished the sentence everyone in the room was talking again.
    Some were talking to Rhodes, some were talking to each other, and some were just talking to keep from being the only ones who weren’t talking. Rhodes held up his hands for quiet, but he didn’t get it. He was thinking of his pistol again when the shrill of the whistle cut the air.
    “I never heard such