The Kissed Corpse Read Free

obscene postcard, or laughing heartily at a vulgarly pointless joke.
    My thoughts, however, were mostly of Leslie Young, and after I had walked for a long time, it occurred to me that there might be something I could do to prevent him from getting into serious trouble with Dwight.
    I turned back abruptly at a point where the canyon gradually flattened out into a broad valley. The pups seemed pretty well fagged out, but not eager to return. It was downhill and easy going, but they continually lagged back, pausing to sniff the air, then hurrying close behind me.
    Dusk comes early in the bottom of a canyon, and we left the sunlight behind us by the time we’d covered half the distance back. There was a distinct chill in the air, and a blacker shadow seemed to hover over the silent steep-walled gap just ahead of us as we moved on … fading forward as we moved into it … keeping pace with us.
    It was a distinct relief to sight the stone wall surrounding the Dwight estate and realize that it was only a little way to the Young cottage. I was getting jittery, and felt a need to know whether Leslie Young had acted on an impulse and gone after Dwight immediately.
    I had just passed the Dwight driveway when I heard hurried steps around the bend beyond. In the solitude and the silence the noise came as a distinct shock, and I stopped with a prickly sensation around the base of my scalp.
    Then, I saw the man across the road from me. He was middle-aged and tall, bareheaded, with a high forehead. His face was pale, features thin and ascetic, with pince-nez pinched on the bridge of an arrogant nose. He wore a white sweater and plus-fours, and carried an English walking stick which he thudded on the pavement with every step.
    He did not look in my direction, but hurried on, paying no heed to the pups when they started across the road with a friendly greeting. I turned to watch him as he went up the drive into the Dwight estate.
    I knew him then. I had seen his picture in the paper several times, but not lately. Rufus Hardiman. One of the higher-ups in our State Department in Washington. A house-guest in the Dwight home.
    We went on around the bend, and suddenly the pups dashed ahead as we approached a culvert over a deep gully cutting in from the left. They scampered across the road, yelping with excitement toward a turn-out in a grove of oaks, then came to a halt with neckhairs bristling.
    I followed them into the deeper shadow of the oaks. I saw a saddled horse tied to a sapling.
    I halted where I was, peering through the shadows at the crumpled body of a man beneath a small oak. I had a sick empty feeling that a murder had been committed and that I might have prevented it. I knew Leslie Young was in a mood for murder when he rode way from my cabin.
    A few steps closer I stopped again, staring down unbelievingly at the corpse of Leslie Young .
    He was the one man in the world I hadn’t expected to see lying there.
    He was peacefully slumped as if in restful relaxation. Crusted blood stained the short hair above his right ear … and there was the brighter stain of crimson on his lips.
    I took one more step which brought me directly over the body. Shaken and unnerved by the unexpectedness of it, I stooped closer to his face. The crimson of his lips was ludicrous. His mouth was naturally thin and tightly drawn in death, but the perfect imprint of a woman’s full lips made it into a cupid’s bow.
    Stranger than this, however, and far more awesome, was a two-barred cross of crimson on his right cheek. A long vertical mark crossed by shorter lines … wide marks, such as might have been made with a child’s crayon, or with a woman’s carmine lipstick.
    The symbol of the double cross, was my dazed thought as I stood up and rushed to the highway, thinking only of getting word to Jerry Burke.

3
    I heard the motor of a speeding car as I stood there, and I hurried out to the highway to flag down a couple of