The Ghost Wore Yellow Socks Read Online Free PDF

grimy windows caught his attention. Talk about your long shots, but Nick had learned a long time ago never to assume anything. He turned his flashlight on.
    The trunk was locked, but he picked the old lock without much trouble. Lifting the lid, he was greeted by the scent of mothballs. The interior was stuffed with junk: a couple of battered photo albums, old Life magazines, a black doll missing an arm, draperies that looked like shrouds. He shut the trunk, snapped off his flashlight, and headed for the linen closet.
    A relic of more genteel times, the walk-in closet opened with a lugubrious screech of unused hinges. Nick waited for the sounds of alarm, ready to abort.
    Nothing. He pulled the chain of the overhead light bulb. Tired light flooded empty, dirty shelves and cobwebs big enough to accommodate a Jules Verne spider. Dust carpeted the floor; Nick didn’t need to get down on hands and knees to verify that no one, dead or alive, had been in this room for years.
    Strike two.
    The kid -- or maybe it had been the Bridger woman -- had mentioned a laundry chute.
    Nick ran the flashlight beam along the wall. He had a vague memory of laundry chutes in hotels. Usually they opened out into the basement. Shoving it down a laundry chute might be a good way to get rid of a corpse, but there didn’t seem to be a chute door on this floor.
    The two tower rooms mirrored each other, and since there was no laundry chute in Nick’s room, he was pretty sure the kid didn’t have one, either.
    That meant someone would have to lug the corpse down to the second level and stuff the body into the laundry chute there. Most of the chutes Nick had seen weren’t that big. It might be a good way to dispose of a child or a midget; an adult-sized corpse was liable to get stuck in place.
    He proceeded along to the Foster boy’s apartment, feeling inside the unlit rooms for the light switch.
    Briefly, he was distracted by the spread of painted canvases. White church steeples against stormy skies, a lonely, windswept red barn, golden trees: New England autumn.
    What did Foster do with all this? Did he try to sell it? It was better than a lot of stuff Nick saw for sale.
    He studied the meticulously cared-for brushes, the tantalizing tubes of color, the sponges, rulers, razors, knives, rolls of canvas. An expensive hobby, if that’s what it was.
    Opening the bedroom window, he stared down at the tall ladder glistening in the light coming from behind him. Here was the most likely explanation. The window had no screen, and it was large enough to push a man through.
    But when Nick had checked, the window was locked. How did someone stuff a body out through a window, climb out themselves without dropping the body, close the window, and then lock it from the inside?

    20 Josh Lanyon
    For that matter, how did an intruder get in through a locked window?
    Okay, say the window hadn’t been locked to start with. Still no easy task to cart a deadweight up a twenty-foot ladder. Going down, the killer could just drop his load, but even that was a risk. Someone might hear the body crashing against the house. It might hang up in the trees. Shoving a corpse out of a window presented a number of logistical problems.
    But a man might be desperate enough to try. Mostly it would depend on the size of the body and the size of the man carrying the body.
    Wind skulked around the house, rising up to rustle the wet leaves with a ghostly hand.
    Nick shook his wet head like a dog and ducked back inside the apartment.
    The intruder would have to be a man, he decided. A man in good shape. Nick was in great shape, but he wasn’t sure he could tote a dead body too far, unless the deceased had been the size of someone like Perry Foster. And judging by the size of that missing shoe…
    It had to be an inside job. Nothing else made sense. Nick contemplated the other male residents of the Alston Estate. David Center sounded like a wacko, but he was blind, which probably put him out