The Diehard Read Online Free PDF Page B

there's fancy bath crystals and oils in the water, as if someone prepared the bath carefully.”
    “Here's something, Frank,” one of the other technicians said. He held out a filter on which there was sand and dirt and a piece ofwood or plastic about the size of a silver dollar. Frank picked the piece up with a pair of tweezers and held it up for Mulheisen to see.
    “Know what that is, Mul?”
    “That? That is . . . ah . . . well, let's see. What do you think, Frank?”
    Frank smiled and pushed his glasses back onto the bridge of his nose. “Sergeant, in my professional opinion this here is a piece broken off a pistol grip.” He dropped the fragment into a plastic bag and sealed it. The bag was labeled and initialed. “Know the make of the gun, Mul?”
    Mulheisen looked at him sourly. “No,” he said.
    “It isn't an automatic,” Frank said. “There's no empty cartridges lying around. Of course, they could have picked up their empties, but it doesn't look like they were that careful. And then this shape isn't rectangular enough for an automatic grip. No, I'd say it was a revolver, probably an H & R .32, say. Looks like the kind of material they use for grips, something they call cycolac.”
    “I'm impressed,” Mulheisen said. “How about latents?”
    A Tennessee drawl that belonged to a long, raw face said, “Feller was wearing gloves. Got blood smudges all over, whole handprints, but no fingerprints.”
    Mulheisen went back into the bedroom. He began to look through the desk drawers. There were several pictures of the murdered woman, a couple of them in which she wore a bikini. One of the technicians glanced over his shoulder at the pictures. “Wow,” he said.
    “Yeah,” Mulheisen said.
    There were a few letters, presumably from friends. Most of them seemed to be from people in distant cities like San Francisco, New York or London. One, however, was from a woman in Grosse Pointe. Why, Mulheisen wondered, would someone in a Detroit suburb write a letter to someone in Detroit?
    It was a social note, on engraved stationery, dated December 10—last week.
Dear Jane,
    I haven't been able to get you on the phone, dear, but I thought you would like to know that Lou will be home next week, the 16th.
    Why don't you call? Perhaps you could have lunch.
    Affectionately,
    Margaret
    The engraved address said “Mrs. Margaret Drake Spencer, Lakeside Drive, Grosse Pointe.”
    There was an address book on the desk. Mulheisen flipped it open to the “S” section. The address and telephone number of Lou Spencer was written in a woman's handwriting.
    Who was Lou Spencer? he wondered. An old friend? Or an old lover? Today was the seventeenth.
    “What time is it?” he asked a lab man.
    “Going on eleven,” the man said.
    Mulheisen thought it was unlikely that he would learn anything from the Spencers. But it was early and he had to start somewhere. He had to start learning about a beautiful heiress, said to be carefree and gay, a perfect daughter and wife, who now lay under a bright overhead light in the Wayne County Morgue while men she had never known peeled back her skin and probed her body with delicate instruments.

Six
    Lou Spencer was not what Mulheisen had expected. She was not beautiful, but her figure compared favorably with Jane Clippert's. She was twenty-nine years old, five-five, and had a way of smiling that made her seem to squint.
    The Spencer place was pretty impressive, as well. About two hundred thousand dollars’ worth of Colonial splendor that looked out on Lake St. Clair across a lawn that was larger than the combined flight decks of several U.S.S. Forrestals. A very pretty black maid put Mulheisen in a long and elegant room to wait for the Spencers. There were tall windows with pale draperies. The fireplace was tall and ornate and there was a very clean fire of logs on the grate.
    Lou Spencer was a voluble and cooperative informant. She seemed genuinely shocked by the death of her friend, but it