Death Likes It Hot Read Online Free PDF

successful: everyone’s treated like a long-lost cousin.”
    The butler slithered into the room at that moment and came, to my surprise, to me: “Mr. Sargeant, sir, you are wanted on the telephone.” An honest-to-god English butler who said “telly-phone.”
    It was Liz. “Oh, hi, Peter. I wondered what you were doing.”
    “I’ve been wondering that myself.”
    “Dull?”
    “Deadly. How’s your place?”
    “Not much better. Will you be at the dance tomorrow night?”
    “I don’t know. One of the guests mentioned it so I figured we’ll go; if not.…”
    “Come anyway. Say you’re my guest. I’ll leave a note at the door for you.”
    “I’ll like that. It’s a full moon, too.”
    “A full what?”
    “Moon.”
    “Oh, I thought you said ‘room.’ Well, I’ll be looking for you.”
    We hung up. I felt very much better. I had visions of the two of us rolling amorously in the deserted dunes while the moon turned the sea and the sand to silver. Maybe this job wasn’t going to be as grim as I thought.
    Around midnight, the bridge game broke up and everybody had a nightcap except our hostess who had what could only be called an Indian war bonnet: a huge brandy glass half filled with enough cognac to float me straight out to sea.
    “I hope we’re not too dull for you,” she said, just before we all parted for bed.
    “I couldn’t be having a better time,” I lied.
    “Tomorrow we’ll do a little business and then of course we’re going to the Yacht Club dance where you can see some young people.”
    “And what’s wrong with us?” asked Miss Lung roguishly.
    I was not honor-bound to answer that and after a round of good nights, we all went upstairs. I followed Mary Western Lung and the sight of those superb buttocks encased in red slacks would, I knew, haunt my dreams forever.
    To my dismay, I found her room was next to mine. “What a coincidence!” was her observation.
    I smiled enigmatically, ducked into my room, locked the connecting door and then, just to be safe, moved a heavy bureau against the door. Only a maddened hippopotamus could break through that barricade; as far as I knew, Miss Lung was not yet maddened.
    I slept uneasily until three-thirty when, right in the middle of a mild, fairly standard nightmare (falling off a cliff), I was awakened by three sharp screams, a woman’s screams.
    I sat bolt upright at the second scream; the third one got me out of bed; stumbling over a chair, I opened the door and looked out into the dimly lit hall. Other heads were appearing from doorways. I spotted both Claypooles, Miss Lung and, suddenly, Mrs. Veering who appeared on the landing, in white, like Lady Macbeth.
    “
Do
go back to sleep,” she said in her usual voice. “It’s nothing … nothing at all. A misunderstanding.”
    There was a bewildered murmur. The heads withdrew. I caught a glimpse of Miss Lung’s intricate nightdress: pink decorated with little bows befitting the authoress of
Little Biddy Bit.
Puzzled, uneasy, I dropped off to sleep. The last thing I remember thinking was how strange it was that Mrs. Veering had made no explanation of those screams.
    At breakfast there was a good deal of talk about the screams … that is at first there was until it became quite clear that one of our company had been responsible for them; at which moment everybody shut up awkwardly and finished their beef and kidney pie, an English touch of Mrs. Veering’s which went over very big.
    I guessed, I don’t know why, that Mrs. Brexton had been responsible; yet at breakfast she seemed much as ever, a little paler than I remembered but then I was seeing her for the first time in daylight.
    We had coffee on the screened-in porch which overlooked the ocean: startlingly blue this morning with a fair amount of surf. The sky was vivid with white gulls circling overhead. I amused myself by thinking it must really be a scorcher in the city.
    After breakfast everybody got into their bathing suits