Death After Breakfast Read Online Free PDF

found Sims back at his post outside the door of Suite A.
    “What happened with Mayberry?” I asked him.
    “First he is going to complain to the mayor, and after that the White House,” Sims said.
    He took us into the suite. The living room was deserted. Sims knocked on the bedroom door and asked for Hardy. The big detective came out of the murder scene after a moment or two.
    He acknowledged my introduction to Shirley with a pleasant smile. She made people smile, even in a situation like this. “I read your column each day it appears, Miss Thomas,” he said. “Sorry to drag you into this mess.”
    “I don’t know how I can help,” she said. “She has a husband, you know, James Kauffman. They’ve been separated for some time, but he should know a great deal more about her than I do.”
    “Among the missing so far,” Hardy said. He gestured Shirley to a chair.
    She started to open her briefcase. “The thing that seems unlikely, from what Mark told me, is rape.”
    “Oh?”
    “Rumor has it that she will say yes to anyone, from the grocer’s delivery boy and the milkman to a complete stranger on the street corner. She wouldn’t have put up a fight to avoid sexual acrobatics with anyone.
    “The woods are full of psychos, Miss Thomas,” Hardy said. “This one probably didn’t stop to ask, assumed resistance, and—didn’t know. Perhaps his pleasure was in the killing and not the sex.”
    “Oh my God,” Shirley said.
    “She must have been a very handsome, very sexy-looking woman,” Hardy said. “Incidentally, the door wasn’t forced. Whoever came in, she let in.”
    “Sounds in character,” I said.
    “Probably someone she knew,” Hardy said.
    “I don’t understand what she was doing with a suite here,” Shirley said. “She has a duplex on Park Avenue, only a few blocks from here.”
    “She was chairman of the Cancer Fund Ball, coming up tonight,” Hardy said. “There were a million details to handle. I suppose she wanted to be on the scene.”
    “So a lot of people must have been coming and going,” I said. “She wouldn’t have hesitated to answer the doorbell without finding out first who it was. She expected traffic.”
    “Makes sense,” Hardy said. He looked at Shirley and smiled his pleasure again. “What can you tell me that are facts about Laura Kauffman, Miss Thomas? We can try the gossip on for size later.”
    Shirley took a couple of sheets of paper out of her briefcase. Laura Kauffman was evidently a big enough “wheel” in the social world for Shirley to have kept a file on her. There hadn’t been time to type up these pages.
    “She was born Laura Hemmerly,” she said, glancing at her notes. “Jason Hemmerly, her father, was big steel. He died a couple of years ago and left Laura a very rich woman. Like a villa in the south of France, duplex on Park Avenue, something fancy in the Virgin Islands.”
    “What you call cosmopolitan,” Hardy said.
    “Good target for a thief,” I said.
    “But a butcher?” Hardy said, his pleasant face hardening. “About her husband, Miss Thomas?”
    Shirley shifted pages. Three of them,” she said. “The first when she was sixteen. I don’t have number one’s name. He was a ski instructor somewhere in the Swiss Alps. This was in 1940, just before the big war.”
    Hardy’s eyebrows rose. “That makes her fifty-three. I’d have thought she was quite a lot younger.”
    “Maybe she’s been rebuilt,” I said.
    Shirley glanced at me. “You don’t have to go to seed in your fifties,” she said.
    “You’ve got a long wait to find out,” I said.
    “The husbands, Miss Thomas,” Hardy said. ‘
    Shirley went back to her notes. “As I say, I don’t have the first one’s name. It was something of a scandal. The usual suggestion that she was pregnant.”
    “But no child? No children ever?”
    “No record of any. There was the war then, right after an annulment Papa bought off the ski instructor, one guesses. Then there was the