The Body Beautiful Murder by Kin Platt

Author:Kin Platt [Platt, Kin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4405-4044-8
Publisher: Prologue Books
Published: 1976-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Sixteen

Back in my room, I did the best thing I knew of for a headache and nagging frustration and hit the bottle. It didn’t hit back; we got along fine. I called the food fanatics’ hall and the phone kept ringing. When it was answered, the impatient voice identified itself as the cleaning woman. The lecture all over, she said, everyone gone home. She hung up before I had a chance to ask if the guest speaker had passed out small plastic bags of a crystalline product to her audience to help them pick up a new habit.

I called a few hotels to find out if they registered a Ms. Debbie Hill, and they went through the motions and told me they did not. There were lots more hotels, but I cooled off. As a traveling lecturer, she could be off to another place, another town where proper diet was coming on strong over key-switching parties, or she might have gone back to L.A.

1 called the constabulary in Berkeley and identified myself to their forensic man, who had a good tag for the line, Dr. Bill Blood. I offered Doc Shipman, the L.A. pathologist, as my character reference, and he loosened up and told me some of what I wanted to know.

He told me the deceased was a white male, thirty-two years old, name of Dr. Fred Guest, employed at the university. Cause of death due to gunshot wounds, homicide. Probable weapon, a.22 fired at close range. Ballistics was still on the report.

“When was he killed, Doc?”

“Approximate time of death ten a.m. to twelve noon.”

“Could it have been earlier?”

“Yeah — or later. You get these bodies soaked in cold water and you never really come close. It’s an educated guess and I had to put something down. The only one who could tell us for sure was the victim, and he can’t talk.”

“Well, there’s the killer, also.”

“Sure. When you catch up with him, find out for me. I’m interested for personal reasons. I’m thinking of killing my wife.”

“Luck.”

“Yeah. I know divorce is the more rational thing to do. But somehow killing her makes more and more sense.”

I asked if they had any suspects yet on Guest’s murder. So far, he told me, I was the only one.

It was an hour till midnight. Having my skull sapped twice in one night, and meeting with the light-bulb king Shine made my adrenalin flow. I got up too nervous to hang around and went out hoping I’d get a chance to hit somebody and work it off.

The North Beach part of town seemed as good a place as any and a cab tootled me over. The gay joints on Broadway were swinging and the walks were jammed with sightseers. I got out to lend them a hand.

The pictures and posters were all a come-on for the nudie shows with a little simulated sex thrown in. A lot of places had been busted and appeals were piling up. Meanwhile the street looked wide open.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.