Long Live the Dead Read Online Free PDF Page B

scowled, massaged his chin slowly, looked up into O’Brien’s scowl.
    “That’s her all right, Jay. Twenty years old, five-foot-seven, dark hair and eyes, attractive, Italian-looking. That’s her.”
    “Listen,” O’Brien scowled. “I been a flatfoot twenty years, and this fits too easy. See? It smells. You find an undressed stiff at four in the afternoon without a ghost’s chance of identifying it, and at five the phone rings and a guy gives you all the info it would take you two months to dig up. Ain’t that lovely now? Better check up.”
    Bill nodded, tore off the memo sheet, stood up. The phone rang. O’Brien clamped the receiver between ear and shoulder, said “Hello” through his cigar, then listened. He forked the receiver slowly.
    “Macy,” he said to Bill, “calling from DePisa’s office. The girl was stabbed. Been dead not more than twenty-four hours, probably less.”
    “Yeah?”
    “Go out and smell around. Find out who phoned me that identification.”
    “Yeah.”
    Bill went out and climbed into a taxi.
    T he name on the memo sheet was Rose Veda, the address 154 Vernon Street, South End. Bill climbed the high wooden steps, knuckled the doorbell, stood scowling at a frosted globe with Board and Rooms painted on it in black. The door opened and a smallish woman with thin dry lips and a checkered house dress said: “Yes?” “Does Miss Rose Veda live here?” “She rooms here, yes,” the woman said. “Home, is she?”
    “I don’t believe so. I haven’t seen her today. Is there any message?”
    “Mind showing me her room?” Bill suggested.
    “Her room? Who are you?”
    Bill put two fingers in his vest pocket and brought out a nickeled badge. The woman said: “Oh. You’re a—a policeman.”
    “Yeah.”
    The woman said “Oh” again, and then: “Yes, surely. The room is upstairs, Rose hasn’t—” as Bill stepped past her into the hall—“done anything wrong, has she?”
    Bill shrugged, waited for her to close the door, then followed her down the carpeted hall. The room was on the second floor, midway down the corridor The woman produced a bunch of keys unlocked the door. Bill entered slowly.
    The room was small, stuffy, with an old-fashioned chiffonier, wooden bed, one window, two rag rugs. Bill walked to the chiffonier and picked up a photograph in a cheap tin frame. The woman said: “That’s her. Those pictures on the wall are her too. She posed for them.”
    Bill put the photo down and stood with his hands hipped, gazing at the pictures on the wall. They were magazine covers, all four of them, mostly carmine and yellow. The first was a nude girl holding a parrot; the second was a nude girl looking at canaries in a cage; the third was a nude girl stroking a Pekinese; the fourth was a nude girl fondling a large cat. The woman said: “She’s posing for a whole series of them for that magazine. It comes out every two weeks and she’s on the cover of every issue. The next one has her lying beside a bowl of goldfish. She’s working on it now.”
    Bill squinted at the artist’s name and said, scowling: “I’ll take these, May need ’em.”
    “But—”
    “She won’t mind. Has she got any friends?”
    “You mean boy friends?”
    “Yeah. Either kind.”
    “She has a boy friend,” the woman said. “Edwin, his name is. I don’t know his other name. He comes here often.”
    “To her room?”
    “Well, yes, sometimes. I don’t allow my girls to have boy friends in their rooms, but Rose and Edwin are such good friends.”
    “On good terms?”
    “Oh, yes. That is, all except her posing. He doesn’t like that, and I don’t know as I blame him. After all, it isn’t very nice for a girl to pose with no clothes on. They were having an argument about it only night before last. I didn’t try to listen, you understand, but he was talking loud. He said he wouldn’t stand for it any more and if she didn’t stop he’d—”
    “He’d what?”
    “He—well, he said