Built for Trouble Read Online Free PDF

been addicted to the not uncommon practice of buying rotgut and pouring it into bottles from Johnny Walker and other name brands, for the benefit of the few visitors he had in for drinks. The investigators found his empty gallon jug, some full bottles with fancy labels, broken seals, and cheap hooch, and a half empty fifth he’d been pulling on at (he time of his death. Tests, so the item said, showed amyl alcohol, a product which is removed in proper distillation but occasionally left in in the bathtub merchandise. It sometimes causes blindness, often death, and Hank had gotten quite a jag on. The police were having trouble tracing the peddler of the illegal booze; understandably there wasn’t a bill of sale lying around.
    The paper also mentioned that five photographs were apparently missing from what the paper called “a panel of sexy pinup shots” on the wall.
    I had noticed those blank spaces earlier but it wasn’t surprising that no one could find them. The mess Hank’s place was in, they were lucky to find their way to the door. I grinned, thinking that if they looked long enough the pix would turn up. Sawyer was mighty proud of those shots and they’d be around some place. The fact that they were missing didn’t have to mean anything in particular.
    When I finished the paper I tossed it aside and spent a few minutes wondering if just possibly there could be some connection between Hank’s death and my black Sunday at the beach, but there didn’t seem to be much to go on. Certainly the police hadn’t tied them together. I gave up too, went up to the Top-o-the-Mark for an evening with legitimate whisky bottled in bond, and got thoroughly looped.
     
    Monday morning my closing paycheck arrived from L.A., and I was on the move again. To Reno, this time. It’s the best place this side of The Foreign Legion for a guy with troubles to forget. The first couple of days were uneventful. Then I met a chick who was taking the Reno cure for a marriage that hadn’t panned out and things picked up for both of us. We met in a bar and wound up in a motel. We’d been there three days—some cards, some drink, a lot of time in the hay, an occasional swim in the heated pool—and then she pulled the cork and washed the whole damn mess over me again.
    Purely coincidence, of course. We hadn’t labored each other with any long-winded discussions of our immediate past. She was Marie and I was Eddie and we were down to fundamentals. On Sunday morning we were lounging around the motel room, a total of three pieces of clothing for the two of us, and the Sunday paper scattered over the bed. I glanced through the sports section and wasn’t paying much attention to her chatter until the name Nola Norton jumped out at me.
    “How’s that again?” I asked quickly.
    “Not important, Eddie,” Marie said. She stood up and let the paper slip to the floor. “Just reading a Hollywood column and all I said was that the kind of luck Nola Norton has should happen to me. Just any old day at all, it should.”
    “Oh?”
    I said it casually, but my interest in the Los Angeles Dodgers had suddenly dwindled. I reached for the paper, turned to the movie section, and began to read the column as Marie disappeared into the bathroom.
     
    One of the neatest three-piece packages to be peddled in years went to Apex Pictures on Thursday. The book is Island Love. It will be scripted by Alex Coleman, but the principle prize in the bag is Nola Norton.
    An ex-lifeguard, Miss Norton is a natural for the feminine lead in Island Love, and if you have a Monday paper from two weeks ago (but who could forget) you’ll get a rough idea of how Miss Norton will look in a sarong. She’s a photographer’s dream. Joe Lamb is the agent who made the sale and reported price is an even two hundred thousand dollars.
     
    I tumbled off of the bed, crumpled the sheet of paper, and booted it into a corner. The dame writing that gossip column had missed one item. I’d run