Pardon My Body Read Free

like that.”
    â€œAny ideas?”
    â€œNot one. It was all like I told you and I don’t even begin to know what it means.”
    Giuseppe brought the deep apple pie and the ice cream. While he served it I tried to think of something. I achieved another of my many failures. I began eating again instead.
    â€œYou’ll love this,” I said. “It’s…” I quit in midstream. Julia Casson wasn’t eating. She had bared her small white teeth and her face wore the hardest and strangest look. Then it was gone. I followed her stare across the grill at the corner table where the sharp toughie and the oldster were sitting. Only the sharp boy wasn’t sitting there any more. But the silver-haired bird was. Still with his chin sunk on his chest. Which was odd when you came to think about it. Why should a guy sit for a half-hour with his chin on his shirt front? I felt icy fingers playing an obbligato up and down my spine.
    There was another look on Julia Casson’s face. Strained, almost unbelieving. She said, with difficulty, “I…I know that man. It’s Mr. Banningham’s partner. Mr. Arnold Grierson…I didn’t see him when he came in. There seems to be something…”
    But I was out of my seat and moving across the floor. The two cocktail glasses were empty—but if Grierson had sunk his drink somebody must have bored a hole in him and poured it in. In fact somebody had bored a hole. I found that out when I thrust his chin up. The handle of a long-bladed Task Force dagger stuck out of his elegant shirt. The point was deep in his heart.
    I knew now why Mr. Grierson had lost his pink-brick complexion.

CHAPTER TWO
    I WAS LYING IN BED THE next morning watching a long diagonal shaft of sunlight which had found the solitary chink in the heavy window drapes. It threw a small zone of the green-and-gold bed covers into blazing relief against the blackness of the room. The hour was ten o’clock and I was wondering what breakfast before mid-afternoon was going to taste like.
    Then I heard the outside door to the lounge swing inwards, thudding pads across the carpet—and in another second the bedroom door was open, electric lights were blazing and Detective-lieutenant O’Cassidy was leaning against the lintel surveying the scene with evident disapproval, his faded raincoat tied round his middle with a leather belt, an old snap-brim which hadn’t snapped in five years pushed back on his lank black hair.
    I tossed a half-empty package of Luckies across.O’Cassidy lit one and dropped the match on the carpet. I winced.
    â€œPeople,” I said slowly, “usually get the desk to phone up to see if I either can or will see them. If you get my meaning.”
    â€œYeah?” O’Cassidy seemed only faintly interested. He hung the cigarette from his mouth, walked across to the window, flung back the drapes, walked back to the door and switched off the lights. “In th’ int-er-ests of economy,” he explained.
    I slid both feet to the floor and sat on the edge of the bed, filling my pipe.
    â€œD’you smoke that thing if you wakes up in th’ middle of th’ night?” asked O’Cassidy interestedly.
    â€œSometimes.”
    O’Cassidy used his thumbnail to push some of the breakfast he’d eaten two hours before out of his front teeth. He stood there, rocking slightly on his heels and toes, six feet tall, thin, pale, harassed-looking—and as tough a copper as they come. And if every man has his price, no big shot had ever found Desmond O’Cassidy’s. He had that dark Celtic passion for a cause which in County Cork thirty years ago might have put him behind a barricade with his blazing eyes along a sniper’s rifle. On the sidewalks of New York in 1950 it drove him to hunt all the menwithout the law—and the men who tried to use the law to break it.
    Killers, grafters, con men, pimps, prostitutes,