The Body Came Back Read Online Free PDF

Carla.”
    “All right,” she agreed submissively. “When she calls I’ll tell her. I guess we’re in your hands now, Mike Shayne. I’m at the end of my rope. Maybe I shouldn’t have called you,” she went on wildly. “Maybe I should have taken a chance…”
    “Calling me was the best thing you ever did,” he told her quietly. “Now: Before we get the police in on this I’d like to have all the background I can get.”
    “The police? Oh, God, I thought… I hoped that maybe you…”
    “Not a chance,” Shayne told her calmly. “This is homicide even though it is self-defense. I’m sticking my neck out as it is by not reporting it immediately. But I don’t see that a few minutes either way can make much difference. Actually, it will look a lot better for Vicky if she is here to give herself up when the police come. How old is your daughter, by the way?”
    “Twenty-one, Mike. Just past twenty-one. She… was to be married tomorrow. That’s why she was in Miami. I flew in for the wedding… my darling, little girl. Oh, God, I can’t realize yet…” Her face broke into pieces as she fought for self-control. She won the battle and smiled wanly, a ravaged and pitiful smile.
    “But I promised to tell you about Al… Donlin was his name. I was just eighteen when I eloped with him from a little farm in Ohio. I think the only reason he married me was because he hoped to stay out of the draft. But it didn’t work and they took him in the army anyhow… a few months before Vicky was born. I was glad. I didn’t want her to know her father. He was mean and sadistic and shiftless. I went home when Vicky was born and he didn’t write from the army. They forced him to give us part of his pay as an allotment, but that stopped when the war was over and he was discharged.
    “I left home then, with Vicky and went to Denver and found a job to support the two of us. I used my maiden name and made my parents promise to never tell Al where I was. And they didn’t. He came back and pestered them some, and then drifted away, and I heard later that he’d been sent to prison for knifing a man in a drunken brawl, and I was glad and put him out of my mind.
    “And I made a new life for Vicky and myself in Denver. I got into a newspaper job and was finally doing feature articles for the Woman’s Page on the Denver Post. Then, about seven years ago… Vicky was fourteen, I remember, they ran a little story about me in the paper with a picture of Vicky and me at home. I thought nothing of it. I believed Al was still in prison… had practically forgotten that he existed… until he turned up in Denver one day.
    “He’d seen the story and our picture in the paper some place, and hitch-hiked to Denver. He wanted to move in with me, demanded money, threatened all sorts of things. I stalled him off… promised to borrow money the next day and give him a thousand dollars… and that night I packed up and left Denver.
    “You say it never pays to run, Mike. Well, I ran that time and I think it paid off. I couldn’t stand the thought of Vicky ever seeing him… knowing him as a father. I didn’t tell her the truth. I told her I’d had an offer to write for the movies in Hollywood and we had to go at once. That very night. We made an exciting game out of it. I told her a vague story about being under contract to the newspaper and the mean old editor wouldn’t release me to take the movie job, and so we were going anyhow. I had a car and we drove straight through to Los Angeles, and I used that story as an excuse to Vicky for changing our name when we got there… and I became Carla Andrews, and, by God, I made it pay off, Mike.
    “From my newspaper experience I knew enough about writing to get some small assignments and wangle my way in to see producers… and within a year I was doing scripts for some of the top shows.
    “That’s how I met Brett Halliday. I wrote several segments for the television series at Four Star