The Body Looks Familiar Read Online Free PDF

inspection. The archbishop had let it be known, clearly, that divorce or overt infidelity meant the withdrawal of Cathedral support for any party that kept Jim Latson in high office.
    He wrote a short glad-you-are-enjoying-yourself note, and got his private checkbook—one of his private checkbooks—out of the locked drawer. But when he thumbed through the stubs, he saw that this, the New York book, was not the one he had been using to send Marie her money. He put it away and got the San Francisco book, and that was right.
    There was no use letting her know any more than she had to know. He wrote the check, and was just about to sign it when his red phone buzzed. Orders—his own—were that any man with a red phone dropped everything when it rang, but he took time to lock the checkbooks away before scooping the phone up.
    “Got an arrest in the DeLisle case,” Captain Martin said. “A room waiter. Motive, robbery.”
    Some day Martin was going to drop from the exhaustion of wasting a word.
    “Where are you?” Jim Latson asked.
    “Girl’s flat. Lyons and Koch brought him in. Necklace of hers in his locker.”
    “Keep him there. The body still around?”
    Captain Martin said, “M.E. took it.”
    “Too bad. Looking at bodies is good exercise. I’ll be over. Keep it from the papers if you can.”
    “Can’t. News-Journal was here.”
    “No great harm. Be there in five minutes.”
    “Okay, Chief.”
    Phone on the hook. Note and check in an envelope. Airmail to Italy was—yeah, he remembered, stamped the envelope, addressed it by hand and shoved it in his pocket. The buzzer from downstairs said his car had been brought to the street level.
    But still he took time to check his gun. The suspect might try to escape, and so get killed.
    He wondered as he put his hat on, started out, what the name of the room waiter was.
    Also, he wondered if the guy’s fingerprints would show up at Hogan DeLisle’s. Funny if they didn’t. Not that it mattered. Fingerprints would not be used in this case when it was found that those lifted in the girl’s apartment had gotten mixed up in some way with a bunch of police officers’ prints from Personnel.
    Some clerk would get fired over that. And Captain Martin would have to work the DeLisle case without fingerprints… Too bad, but Martin was a good man, he could do it. You never got fingerprints in a case these days anyway.
    Not to do you much good.

 
Chapter 6
     
    “SHE GAVE IT TO ME,” Ralph Guild said. “Every night, nearly, she phone down for warm milk and crackers, for Ralph to bring it up. When I got there, she would make a little joke; has the new Guild started yet? You see, my name it is the same as a union or something… And I would say no, not yet. So she gave me this string of beads, and she says, when the baby comes and they let you see your wife, give her these; it will make her feel beautiful again. They were not valuable, she said.”
    “Fifty bucks.” This was a detective lieutenant named Sands. “I was on pawnshop detail before I got on Homicide.”
    “Sure,” Jim Latson said. “Fifty bucks is no tip at all for a room waiter. Fifty-buck tips happen every night, sometimes two or three a night.”
    “Please,” Ralph Guild said, “I know fifty dollars is much money. But from a regular patron, one I—”
    “How was she dressed?” Jim Latson asked. “I don’t mean on the night you killed her, last night, but usually. When you brought her”—he dropped one eyelid, drawled his words—“her bedtime crackers and milk.”
    Ralph Guild licked his lips nervously. “Dressed? She would be in bed. She would phone down and unlock her front door; I would bring her her—snack, you call it—and I would lock up when I left.”
    “Snack’s a good word for it,” Sands said. A heavy-fleshed, small-eyed man, he had been a certainty to pick up Chief Latson’s insinuation.
    “Have sex with her?” Captain Martin asked.
    “Me? A waiter? No. She was very rich,