The Kissed Corpse Read Free Page A

city-bound youths in a light coupe.
    â€œIt’s murder,” I told them. “Stop at the first telephone and call the police. Get Jerry Burke if possible. Tell him it’s Asa Baker and I’ll stay with the body until he comes.”
    They drove away reluctantly, craning their necks in morbid curiosity, trying to see the body.
    I walked back into the grove with my eyes wide open this time. There were fresh automobile tracks, showing where a car had recently turned off and parked, backed around and gone back toward El Paso.
    The saddled horse was the same one Leslie Young had ridden to see me earlier. He was standing patiently, as though he didn’t realize his rider would never mount him again.
    I circled back around the body carefully, staying far enough away so as not to mess up any footprints, trying mentally to recreate the murder.
    It had happened while I was gone for my walk up the canyon, of course. I looked at my watch and saw it was nearly four o’clock. I’d been gone over three hours.
    Young had ridden here from his cottage after I left, met someone in a car, perhaps; been killed while he sat quietly beneath the tree. Death had come unexpectedly—instantaneously, I guessed, noting the peaceful look on his face and the relaxed posture of his body.
    Had he arranged to meet Raymond Dwight here? Or, had he called Dwight and threatened him—come here to meet someone else and been killed by Dwight lurking in ambush?
    And, what about Rufus Hardiman? He had been plainly distraught and in a hurry—coming from this direction. I tried to recall exactly what Young had said about Hardiman in my cabin. No actual threat, but he had made it evident that he was deeply moved and angered by the assumption that Dwight was working on a scheme with the diplomat for the return of his expropriated oil property.
    And all the time, my thoughts were edging away from the crimson stain on Leslie Young’s lips, the curious symbol marked in red on his cheek.
    It grew chillier in the lonesome glade, and the shadows deepened. Nip and Tuck were circumspectly back on the edge of the grove and I was damnably alone with the dead man.
    A kiss from rouged lips! A woman’s hand fumbling in her handbag for lipstick, bending down to trace the mark of the double cross in vivid carmine on the cold cheek of a dead man!
    It was ghastly. I paced back and forth, looking anxiously down the winding highway, trying not to wonder what part I had played in the scheme of murder that day, and was at last rewarded by hearing the wail of a rapidly approaching police siren.
    I stepped out into the highway and waved frantically as Jerry Burke’s official car roared into view, and he brought it to a screeching stop beside me.
    Chief of Detectives Jelcoe was in the front seat with Burke. He peered at me irritably with twitching eyelids; grunted an accusing, “Humph,” as though my presence at the scene of murder satisfied a long-standing suspicion.
    I looked past Jelcoe at Burke’s solidly square face. “It’s Leslie Young, Jerry. He’s … lying back here.”
    A radio patrol car and an ambulance were pulling up behind Burke’s roadster. Jelcoe’s long legs stepped out past me in the direction I indicated, and I waited for Burke to come around the car.
    â€œYoung, eh?” There was a tired, hurt look on Burke’s face which I didn’t understand at the moment. “You had gotten in touch with him?”
    â€œThis noon.” I went by Jerry Burke’s side toward Jelcoe, who was standing over the corpse with an air of proprietorship. “I was coming back from a long walk up the canyon when Nip and Tuck scented the body and led me to it,” I went on hastily.
    Burke nodded, moving with a surprisingly light stride for so heavy a man. He’s a surprising fellow in a lot of ways, even to me, and I’ve known him off and on since he was foreman on my dad’s cattle