Long Live the Dead Read Online Free PDF

turned-down brim of his gray hat, Bill Evans swung left off Atlantic Avenue and hiked methodically across the Eastern Star Wharf. Teetering along a wet plank to avoid slopping through a pool of goose-pimpled water, he stood staring at the weather-scarred words, Ritoli’s Fish House , painted across the front of the endmost wharf shanty. Scowling, he pushed in the door, and said impatiently to the shack’s occupant: “You Ritoli?”
    The man said he was Ritoli. He stood behind an enormous counter packed with clams, fish, lobsters, ice. He wore a wet black apron and his hair was greasy and his bare arms were hairy. His face was round and fat and smeared with fish blood.
    “Where’s the stiff?” Bill said.
    “Huh?”
    “The stiff you phoned in about. I’m a cop.”
    Ritoli said: “You a gop? Huh? Yez, zir. Yez, zir, mizter.” He took off his apron and wiped his hands hard on his thighs. “She iz out back. I zhow you.” He put on a dirty brown hat and a blue sweater with leather elbows, and limped to the door. Bill trailed him.
    “She wuz float, in ze water, mizter,” Ritoli explained, limping to the end of the wharf. “I find her wazhed up againzt my clam boat when I go out little while ago for zum clamz. I keep clamz in ze water after I dig zem. Zey keep frezher. Zey—”
    “All right, all right.” Bill scowled. “Forget the clams.”
    Ritoli turned and said: “Watch out here, mizter. Ze rain make ze stepz zlippery.” He limped carefully down a crude stairway to a long float where a half-dozen flat-bottomed boats were upended.
    B ill slipped on the bottom step, crunched one foot into a pile of clam shells, and slouched on again, muttering maledictions. Ritoli scuffed to the end of the float and bent over to drag back a sheet of canvas. He said: “Here zhe iz.”
    The girl lay stark naked beside an upturned dory Her eyes were wide open and glazed. Her body was rigid. She was not more than twenty years old, Bill guessed.
    “W’en I find her,” Ritoli shrugged, “I pull her up out of ze water and put her here. Zen I call ze police station.”
    Bill put his hands in his pockets and stood staring. He forgot it was raining; he felt sick. Leaning forward slightly, he examined a whitish mark in the girl’s breast where the flesh had receded from a deep gash. He fingered the water-soaked rope around the girl’s ankle and studied the frayed end of it, frowning. Then he stood up and swallowed the thickness that came into his throat.
    “All right,” he said. “Cover her up.”
    Ritoli said anxiously: “You will not leave her here like zis, mizter, please? I don’ want—”
    “Where’s your telephone?”
    “Tel’phone? Yez, zir,” Ritoli said quickly. “Yez, zir, mizter.”
    Bill used Ritoli’s phone back in the shanty behind the fish counter, to call headquarters. He said into it: “O’Brien? Evans talking. Listen, Jay—the stiff’s a girl. Young girl, stabbed, rope around her foot. Looks as if she was murdered and thrown in the drink with a weight to keep her under. Rope broke or frayed, and the body got loose. Case for some guy with imagination… . Yeah? Well, maybe I have, but not enough to see the joker behind this… . Okey. I’ll hang around until Macy gets here.”
    Bill lit a cigarette and slouched to the door. To Ritoli he said: “Listen. If a big Mick with size seventeen feet and a mush-melon face asks where I’m at, send him to the one-arm lunch around the corner. I need coffee and beans—something simple and homelike—after looking at that thing you found.”
    “Yez, zir,” Ritoli nodded. “Yez, zir, mizter.”
    “And save that,” Bill said “for Macy. He’ll get a kick out of it. No one ever called him Mister before.”
    Jay O’Brien said across the desk at headquarters, two hours later: “Well, where’s the tie-up? What’s back of it?”
    Bill played an imaginary piano with the tips of his fingers and again read the penciled memo on O’Brien’s desk pad. He