The Body Looks Familiar Read Online Free PDF Page A

door open.
    The man in bed muttered, “Coming right up,” as they slammed into the room, and then he sat up: a skinny guy, about thirty, in polka-dot undershorts. The bed looked as though no expert had made it.
    Koch said, “Ralph Guild?” in a hard, businesslike voice.
    “Yeah, sure. My papers are on the bureau.”
    Lyons slid a hand under the pillow, down among the sheets and then put his gun away. Koch crossed and picked the papers off the bureau. “Immigration,” he said, “naturalization. Court order changing his name from something—thank God, I don’t have to phone it in—to Ralph Guild. He’s a Czech.”
    “He’s a bad check now,” Lyons said. His normally cheerful face was grim. “Out of it, Guild, and on your feet. Get some pants on.” He backed up, started throwing clothes at Guild, first feeling each garment for weapons.
    Guild said, “Yes, sir,” standing up. He was going a little bald, one tooth was missing among his uppers. “May I ask what you want me for, sir?”
    Koch’s voice was kindly. “Take it easy, boy. Don’t mind Mr. Lyons here, it’s just his way. Do you know a girl named DeLisle, Hogan DeLisle?”
    Guild nodded eagerly, fastening his pants. Almost at once he had to unzip them again to tuck his shirt in. “Yes, sir, of course I do. Miss DeLisle, I am her regular waiter. She always asks for me… I must explain, I am night waiter, ten till seven, at the Belmont Apartment Hotel.” He was fumbling with a hideously bright necktie—the only thing in the room that had any kind of color.
    The knot wouldn’t tie to Guild’s satisfaction. He stopped fumbling and suddenly got a thought. “Nothing has happened to Miss DeLisle, sir?”
    “She’s dead,” Lyons said. “Take him to the car, John, while I search the house for the murder weapon.”
    Koch marched Ralph Guild to the car. When Lyons rejoined them, he said absently, “That dame can sure cry,” and started the car.

 
Chapter 5
     
    AS DEPUTY CHIEF, one of Jim Latson’s duties was to wander, without schedule or map, through headquarters building. It kept the men on their toes. And so, when he returned from the murder suite (as the papers were already calling Hogan DeLisle’s apartment), he signed a few letters on his desk and took off.
    Missing Persons, Arson, Radio Room, Personnel. He paused there and lit a cigarette, perched on the edge of the bureau chief’s desk, swinging one leg, idly watching the clerks. When he left, a half dozen civil-service fingerprint cards were in his pocket.
    He went on to Loft Squad, Taxi License Bureau, Juvenile, and into Identification. Two clerks were busily putting together a bundle of prints from the DeLisle apartment; flustered by the personal attention of Chief Latson, they never noticed that the envelope for the FBI was six cards heavier when he left than before he visited them.
    Jim Latson wandered back to his office. The second mail of the day had not been sorted. Two little piles were on his desk: one personal, the other duty. Seeing his wife’s handwriting on the top of the personal file, he went through the other one first.
    But there was no putting it off. He examined the Italian stamp and the flimsy Avion paper until it was more boring not to open the letter than to open it, and used a knife on his desk, a souvenir of a national meeting of peace officers.
    Yeah, she was in Rome. She had an audience with the Holy Father, not a private one to be sure, but the Pope had spent more time blessing her than any of the other pilgrims. She had lit a candle for Latson’s return to the church, and she needed another five hundred dollars.
    Yeah. Except for the amount, which sometimes—but not often—went as low as two hundred, he hadn’t needed to open the envelope at all; habit was an X-ray that could read her letters folded. Yeah.
    He hadn’t been to confession in ten years. But officially he was a Catholic and in politics that meant that his behavior was subject to Cathedral