Kwik Krimes Read Online Free PDF Page A

bad-looking guy.
    When he saw Stewart frowning at the magazines and comics piled all over the shop’s back room, he smiled. “Comics, pulp magazines. When they’re old, they can be worth very big bucks, hundreds of thousands sometimes.”
    Peg Falkner’s body had been discovered the previous evening in a quiet suburb. She’d been walking her dog when she was attacked for no discernible reason by a thug who’d throttled her with a pair of pantyhose.
    “Your fiancée was very attractive—”
    Stewart was interrupted in midsentence by the jingle of the shop’s bell, which caused Swanson to leap to his feet. “I’m expecting someone, an important collector.”
    The collector, a heavyset guy who’d arrived in a limo that he’d double-parked, was shouting loudly about “the detectives” as Stewart was about to leave.
    Stewart turned. “I’m a detective. What’s the beef?”
    “No beef!” the man said impatiently. “Something else!”
    Standing behind the counter, Swanson pointed his finger toward his head, indicating this collector was slightly balmy.
    “Also I want actions! Actions!” the man announced. “Now!”
    Leaving Swanson to his eccentric collector, Stewart decided to visit the small engineering firm where Peg had worked.
    “She was a conscientious employee and a dutiful daughter,” her boss said. “After her father died, she moved back with her mother. But then her mother died just two months ago.”
    A colleague said Peg had recently broken up with her boyfriend, but she hadn’t known the guy’s name.
    It was already dark when Stewart parked his car down the block from Peg Falkner’s home, a nicely maintained split-level.
    As he approached, Stewart saw a man sitting in the cab of a battered Dodge pickup truck parked in the shadows. He flashed his badge and told the guy to climb out and take the position.
    “You got a permit for this?” Stewart asked as he removed a 9 mm Beretta from the guy’s pocket.
    “My name’s Marcus Desmond. And yeah, I have a permit.” Desmond was beetle-browed, broad-shouldered, and was wearing a black leather jacket and a baseball cap turned backward. “The woman who lived in that house there, with the yellow tape in front?”
    “What about her?”
    “She was murdered yesterday. She was a…friend.”
    “Do tell.” More likely, Stewart thought, this was a murderer returning to the scene and maybe intending to knock off a witness who’d seen too much.
    The way Stewart now figured, Peg gave this Desmond the gate after she’d met Swanson. Desmond didn’t have Swanson’s looks or style—and, quite likely, any means of support.
    Stewart thought the sight of a picture of Peg or even a familiar article of clothing might trigger an emotional meltdown or possibly a confession. “Let’s go inside,” he said.
    After a tour of the first floor, Desmond said, “She wanted to sell the house, but she had to get rid of the junk in the basement first. Her father was a clutterbug, someone who could never throw anything away.”
    Stewart pointed the way downstairs.
    In the basement, he saw Desmond hadn’t exaggerated. There were toys, clothing, tools, and furniture, all dating back to Peg’s father’s youth. The basement was so packed he had to turn sideways to move through it.
    With a handkerchief over his face to keep from choking on the dust, Stewart thanked his lucky stars that his wife was a neatness freak.
    “I was going to help her,” Desmond said.
    “Help her how?”
    “With my pickup truck. We planned to haul everything out to the city dump. Peg wanted a clean basement. She hated to come down here.”
    Stewart shoved aside a metal bed in the front room. “What’s the sense of keeping this junk?”
    Desmond shrugged. “Beats me.”
    The really old stuff was located at the front of the cellar, and Stewart saw someone had been in there recently.
    Whoever it was had pushed aside a Schwinn bicycle and a Flexible Flyer sled in order to get behind an old