The Body Lovers Read Free Page A

poisoned, slowly and painfully.”
    “What can you do about it?”
    “Nothing. There’s no body to exhume and no way of proving those tissue samples came from the original corpse. Given a few more days and there won’t be any trace of the chemical that was administered. It’s deteriorated.”
    “And the other one?”
    “A whip that left pretty definite imprints on the flesh. They match specialty items shipped from Australia for a few circus and stage acts.”
    “Trace the buyers?”
    Pat nodded. “The regulars buy them in dozen lots. Straight people. The trouble is, the import house plants them around in all sorts of places ... even to advertising them in those fetish magazines. We checked their orders and they’ve sold hundreds by mail alone. It would be damn near impossible to trace one back.”
    “That leaves her prints.”
    “And her pictures. The photo lab did a pretty good job of reconstructing her as she must have looked.” He held out a four-by-five glossy and I scanned it closely. “Faces like that get remembered,” he told me. “She was quite a beauty.”
    “Can I keep this?”
    “Be my guest. It’ll be in the paper anyway.”
    “Good deal. I’ll call you after I see Temple.”
    “Think it’ll do any good?”
    I let out a short laugh. “I know a few things he wouldn’t want to get around.”
     
    At twelve-thirty I met Mitch Temple at the Blue Ribbon Restaurant on Forty-fourth Street. He had been an old-line reporter who finally made it with a syndicated column and success seemed to have made him more cynical than ever.
    I didn’t have to tell him what I was there for. He had laced the facts together as soon as I had called him, and when we had a drink and put our order in he said, “How come you’re the errand boy, Mike?”
    “Because I might be able to squeeze harder.”
    He gave me a lopsided grin. “Don’t hound me about that party on the yacht. You’ve used that twice already.”
    “Then how about the story you never wrote about Lucy Delacort? That house she ran ...”
    “How did you know about that?”
    “I got friends in strange places,” I told him. “Old Lucy really went for you, didn’t she? In fact ...”
    “Okay, enough, enough. What do you want?”
    “Pat says to lay off the negligee angle in those two deaths.” His face became strangely alert. “I was right,” he said softly, “wasn’t I?”
    “Got me, Mitch. Pat doesn’t want to stir in a sex angle, that’s all. It gives the wrong people ideas. Give him a few days to work it out and you can do what you please. Can do?”
    “That louses up a lot of legwork. I busted my tail tracking down those labels.”
    “How much did you get?”
    Mitch shrugged. “The probable sales outlets. The clerks couldn’t give me anything definite because they were hot items. You know, out-of-towners getting something sexy for the wife back home, servicemen making points with a broad, buying exotic goodies in the big city ... dames trying to stir a little life into the old man with a little nylon lust.”
    “That’s all?”
    “I couldn’t get a description to save my tail. Except for a couple of limp characters who took sizes they could wear themselves. Apparently they were regular customers. I could run them down all right, but I don’t think it would do any good. Maybe you have an idea.”
    “Fresh out,” I said. “Velda mentioned the color combinations, green with the redhead and black with the blonde if it means anything.”
    “Hell, they were the fastest selling numbers. They didn’t even have a pink or a white in stock. Nobody’s modest these days.” Mitch leaned back in his chair. “Maybe you’d better tell Pat I’m still working on it.”
    “So’s he.”
    “I’m surprised nobody else made the connection. It isn’t a big one, but it’s a connection.”
    “Probably because that schoolteacher was a suicide.”
    “Now I’m beginning to wonder about that too,” Mitch growled.
    “So’s Pat, but