Strange Embrace Read Free

in the wrong business.” He sighed heavily. “We might as well get out of here. The microscope boys can do more than we can. We only get in their way. Amazing guys. They can take the lint from a man’s pants cuffs and tell you who he’s been sleeping with. They’ll turn up something.”
    “They’ll turn up a few thousand fingerprints that belong to me,” Johnny said. “I must have handled half the apartment. I didn’t know I was going to find a corpse.” His eyes returned to the wound on the girl’s neck. “You know what killed her?”
    “Something sharp, most likely.”
    “Thanks a lot.”
    “Hell,” Sam Haig said. “Who knows? Maybe a big knife, a long one. Maybe a razor. The lab boys will study it and find out it’s a Malayan kris stolen from the British Museum in eighteen-fourteen. They’re amazing.”
    “If they’re so good, why do they keep you on the force?”
    The big cop grinned. “They need a rough son-of-a-bitch to beat up suspects. And to crash through doors with a gun in his fist. Like in the movies. Let’s get out of here, huh? I have to keep you up all night answering questions. You might miss your train.”
    Ito answered the phone almost at once. “Honorable Mister Lane’s residence,” he intoned. “Humble servant speaking.”
    “Can it,” Johnny said “It’s only me.”
    “I was wondering where you were.”
    “I’m in Haig’s office, Ito. Somebody found Elaine James before I did. Somebody slit her throat.” He stopped to catch his breath. “Ito, there’s a list of people connected with the show in the top drawer of my desk. Call everybody on the list, tell them to miss the train and wait for further instructions. We’ll be delayed a few days at least, maybe more.”
    “Do I tell them why?”
    “No. Just that I said so. They’ll find out soon enough anyway, but in the meantime they might as well stay in the dark. Call them and tell them no train, period. And don’t wait up for me. I’ll be a while.”
    “I’ll be up,” Ito said.
    “Don’t you ever sleep?”
    “Only in the winter,” Ito said.
    Johnny laughed and hung up, then looked across the desk at Haig. “That’s out of the way,” he said. “Now you’re supposed to ask me probing questions.”
    Haig nodded sleepily. “You kill her, Johnny?”
    “What!”
    “Well, I had to ask. It says so in the book. Any idea who did it?”
    “None.”
    “It wasn’t robbery,” Haig said. “She had a pearl ring on one finger and we found a few bucks in plain sight in a dresser drawer.”
    “Is it still there?”
    “Naturally. Cops only rob the living. Anyway, it wasn’t a burglar. Nothing ransacked. So it was sex or some personal-type motive.”
    Johnny nodded. “I can’t think of anybody who would have any reason to kill her,” he said. “Not offhand.”
    “Know much about her?”
    “Not too much.”
    “Let’s have what you know.”
    Johnny lit a cigarette. “Her name’s Elaine James,” he said. “It is now, anyway. She may have changed it somewhere along the line. She’s been in New York for two, three years looking for a break. The usual routine—temporary office help to pay the rent, a round of auditions that didn’t pan out. An occasional bit off-Broadway but never with a show that caught on. When I held open auditions for A Touch of Squalor she stood in line with a few hundred other girls. I took one look at her and saw that she’d be perfect for the lead if she could act worth a damn. So she read for it and she was perfect. A hell of a fine actress.”
    “So she could act. That all you know about her?”
    “Almost all,” Johnny admitted. “She came from a little town upstate. She was too young to have graduated from college and still spend two or three years in New York and die at twenty-two. Maybe she went to a junior college, I don’t know.”
    “We’ll find out.”
    “That’s the point—I don’t think there’s much I can tell you that you couldn’t turn up anyway. She