Kill Your Darlings Read Online Free PDF

picking it up. “Drank himself to a stupor, drowned in the tub.”
    And he walked out of the bathroom and said, “Who are you?”
    I gave him my name and said I was a friend of the deceased, and that I’d found the body in the presence of the deceased’s wife. The man from the coroner’s office glanced over at her and an expression that tried to be world-weary betrayed his cynicism. When he said, “I don’t want to bother her with questions,” it came more out of wanting to get out of here quickly than compassion for the widow.
    He said, “Did the deceased drink heavily?”
    “Yes. I spent most of the evening with him, and he drank heavily, yes.”
    “I mean, did he drink heavily in general?”
    I told him yes, and repeated the story about the near tragedy with the burning cigarette that Mae had recounted to me earlier.
    The man from the coroner’s office nodded and said, “Well, why don’t you let the hotel man, here, call the funeral home and get that poor guy out of the tub.”
    “Are you going to take any pictures?” I asked.
    He looked at me like I’d asked him to dance.
    “What the hell for,” he said. Not a question; just some words strung together that weren’t looking for an answer, and in fact he pushed by me and went over to be by himself and started filling out some official papers on a clipboard from his brown doctor bag.
    “Didn’t you notice anything funny in that bathroom?” I asked him.
    “Oh sure. Lot of laughs in there.”
    “The floor’s bone dry.”
    “So? He drowned by passing out in the tub; he wouldn’t have been splashing around.”
    “There’s only one towel hanging in that bathroom.”
    “So?”
    “Normally, there’d be at least two; I’m in a single room and there were four towels provided.”
    He thought that over.
    I went on: “If somebody had held him down in that tub, and drowned him, there would’ve been lots of splashing around. And a very wet floor that would need mopping up.”
    “And leaving sopping wet towels behind would’ve been a dead giveaway, so the murderer ditched them.”
    “Could be.”
    “Hey, pal. I ain’t Quincy. This guy passed out in the tub, okay?” He went back to his form-filling. But as he did, he asked the assistant manager, who’d been patiently listening to all this, “Do you see anything in the lack of towels?”
    The assistant manager said, “Sometimes we run short of clean towels. If the guest sleeps in and keeps a do-not-disturb sign on his door—the maid may be short of towels by the time she gets around to doing the room. Perhaps leaving only one. Particularly if a guest, like Mr. Kane, is the room’s sole occupant. Such things happen in a hotel.”
    The man from the coroner’s office looked up from his paperwork and his expression said, “See?”
    I turned to the assistant manager. “Is there a closet around here, with a laundry hamper?”
    That seemed a ridiculous question to him, but politeness was his way, so he said, “Most certainly.”
    “Where?”
    “Just across and down several doors.”
    I went out, by myself, and found a numberless door ajar just down the hall and opened it and found a closet with a big hamper with three wet, sopped towels on the top. I didn’t touch anything; just went quickly back.
    The man from the coroner’s office came with me reluctantly, sighing the way only a big man sighs, and examined the sopping towels, with his hands.
    “Watch it!” I said. “Should you be touching those?”
    He looked at me like I was a four-year-old. A stupid one. “Yeah, right, these wet towels pick up the prints of killers like an X ray. Why don’t you give this a rest, and me a break?”
    He walked back across the hall to room 714 and I followed him in, not knowing whether to feel angry or idiotic. I settled for a little of both.
    “You’re not calling the police in, then,” I said.
    “No.” An unfriendly smile and a shake of the head.
    “This could be a murder.”
    “This is an