Meet Me at the Morgue Read Online Free PDF

understand your memory is abominable.”
    He patted her shoulder, simultaneously taking a bite of his sandwich. “At least the salmon is good,” he said in a sandwich-thickened voice. “What’s the beef, Annie?”
    Ann lost her poise completely. She thrust his hand away like a hurt adolescent: “Don’t you call me Annie. I hate that name.”
    “Miss Devon, then. Did I do anything?” He made a deprecatory face, but he seemed to be enjoying the situation.
    “You know what you did. Your memory’s not that bad. It’s not as bad as your morals.”
    “Hey, wait a minute.”
    “I won’t. You lied to me last night. You said you hada client from out of town. You stood me up so you could entertain Mrs. Johnson.”
    “Mrs. Johnson
and
Mr. Johnson. They’re clients, aren’t they? And they’re from out of town. This is outside the city limits, isn’t it?”
    “Go on,” she said. “
Talk
like a lawyer. You won’t change the fact that you lied. I hate lawyers.” A single tear ran down her cheek and dropped from the point of her chin into the plate of sandwiches she was holding.
    I reached across Seifel and took one. “If you two want to finish this off in private, I’ll go and sit in the car.”
    Seifel turned on a smile. “Sorry, old man. Don’t mind us. Miss Devon and I are old sparring-partners.”
    “There are better times and places.”
    Ann left the room with a backward look at Seifel which was meant to be withering and was only pathetic. She seemed to have fallen hard, and nobody had caught her. My dislike of Seifel was turning acute.
    “Women!” he said, with a humorous lift of his shoulders.
    “Ann Devon’s my favorite young woman.”
    “Mine, too. In my book she’s the complete darling. But even the best of them let their emotions get out of kilter now and then. They can never understand that business is business. They want to make everything into a personal issue.”
    “A lot of things are.”
    “Come on now,” he said heartily, “let’s have a little masculine solidarity here.”
    I didn’t smile.
    He changed his manner with an actorish facility and became the earnest young lawyer: “What do you propose to do, Mr. Cross?”
    “Wait.”
    “It’s a long time till midnight. Can we afford to wait? Can the boy afford it?”
    “We have to. Johnson could easily die of chagrin if we don’t. In any case, it won’t affect the boy’s chances much. If they intended to kill him, he’s dead now.”
    “You’re not serious?”
    “I’m afraid I am. He’s a keen, observant boy. Jamie knows who snatched him, if he’s alive. He’d make a good witness, and they must be aware of that.”
    His face registered horror, but Seifel was watching me coolly from some internal center of self-love: “I hope to heaven Fred Miner isn’t in it. I defended him, you know, on the manslaughter charge. Johnson asked me to do it.”
    “I share the hope. I guess we all do. Incidentally, I’d like to get the complete dope on that charge. There’s no doubt he was guilty?”
    “None at all. He never denied it.”
    “And you’re absolutely sure it was an accident?”
    He regarded me quizzically. “I’m never absolutely sure of anything. Beyond a reasonable doubt, is the test we lawyers use. I have no reasonable doubt about it.”
    “Have they identified the victim yet?”
    “Not so far as I know. I haven’t been in touch with Dressen lately.” Sam Dressen was the sheriff’s identification officer. “Anyway, he’s a bit of a weak-willie in his job, if you want my opinion. Washington sent back the prints he took from the corpse. Apparently they were too smeared and faint for classification. By the time they shot them back, the body was buried. Last time I talked to Dressen, he was trying to trace the man through the cleaner’s marks on the suit he was wearing. He promised to let me know if anything came of it.”
    “But nothing has.”
    “I guess not. For all we know, the fellow dropped from the sky.