Kolchak The Night Strangler Read Online Free PDF

Bogart.”
    “Yeah. Me and Bogey. Okay, shweetheart. Let’s shtop kidding around. I want to know where you and the fat man put the Maltese Falcon.”
    “Huh?”
    “Seriously,” I said, nibbling one lovely ear. “About these men who come to see you dance. Did any of their faces ever look…”
    “Later, Carl,” she breathed.
    Louise Harper was one hell of a belly dancer. But in bed, she was even better. She was many things. She was everything. But most of all, she was loving. Genuinely loving. She knew what few women and fewer men do. Relax and enjoy. Throw away the manuals and play it as it lies. For the first time in years I felt really good. I felt young again.
    And as the sun began to brighten the horizon and I found myself drifting off to sleep, Louise’s head tucked tight against my chest, I got the disturbing but not altogether unpleasant feeling that this might not be just another one-night stand. I tried pushing the thought from my mind. At 50, when you haven’t got two nickels to rub together and most of your friends and associates think you’re crazy (when you’re not) and a bum (which you are), life doesn’t offer too many second chances. All sorts of thoughts rattled around my fuzzy brain. I might even forsake the bottle.
    I wrapped my arms more tightly around her. She murmured something and smiled. I hung on like a drowning man.
     

Chapter Five
     
     
     
    Saturday, April 8, 1972
     
    It was a good thing that I’d stayed with Louise. When I woke up she’d ironed my suit as well as it could be ironed, cooked me a very nice breakfast, and laid out the morning edition of the Daily Chronicle . What I saw I didn’t like. If my night hadn’t been so damn pleasant, I’d have been ready to kill Vincenzo. I kept scanning the front page.
    The skyjacker who’d jumped over Provo, Utah, with $500,000 was still on the loose. Fierce fighting was reported in An Loc, 45 miles northwest of Saigon, where the North Vietnamese 5 th Division was battering the defending South Vietnamese Rangers.
    On the local scene, Raymond Franklin Harris, 17, had been sentences for up to 25 years in prison for raping a Lynwood woman and assaulting her fiancé with a gun after kidnapping them in February; Dr. Nicholas Kittrie, an attorney, told those at a symposium on “victimless crime” at the Washington Plaza Hotel that “the concern for the secondary effects of ‘victimless crimes,’ such as prostitution, gambling and pornography, is much to speculative.”
    Big deal! I had to turn to the “Briefs” column on page two to read a two-column-inch item informing the public that the investigations into the two Pioneer Square murders were “continuing” and that there was “some minor loss of blood in both victims but that no link between the murders has yet been established.”
    Great! That was definitely not what I had turned in to Vincenzo. He was wielding his big blue pencil just as indiscriminately as ever.
    With a kiss that made me wish I didn’t have to go to work, Louise bundled me out the door into a chilly overcast and I made great haste in letting Vincenzo know that I thought of him. He was, as usual, unimpressed and adamant.
    “You didn’t really expect me to run that stuff, did you? No unofficial sources. Remember?”
    “So all we mention is the loss of blood in both girls.”
    “Right,” he answered in smug righteousness.
    “I just don’t believe this. Vince, do you know how many papers this story can sell, f’Christ’s sake?”
    Vincenzo was unmoved. “The old man doesn’t want to sell ‘em that way.
    Jesus! “The old man. That old geezer ought to be stuffed and sent to the Smithsonian Institution.”
    Vincenzo started looking ugly. “Kolchak!”
“Oh, don’t give me that ‘Kolchak!’ and the accusing finger routine. I’m going to talk to Gail Manning’s parents.”
“Not today, Kolchak. The old… Crossbinder wants a feature on the historical background of the area where the murders