Read Pardon My Body for Free Online

ain’t mine, either.” grunted Mike. “We acted with the best intentions.”
    â€œMike,” I said, “there isn’t a thing wrong with your argument—except one. Mr. George Clark walked into a ritzy inn out in Connecticut last night with a well-known citizen and walked right out leaving his unusual friend with a Task Force dagger sticking out of his beautifully-laundered dress shirt.”
    I passed through the swing doors just as the first customers of the day were moving in. I didn’t think Mike would be in much shape to deal with them….

CHAPTER FOUR
    I F YOU’RE THINKING OF paying a visit to our town you needn’t bother to take in the Fiftieth Street sector. It might spoil your appetite for dinner. Crummy is the word. A rundown zone of walk-up apartment houses, hamburger stands and an air of general dispiritedness. Walking into it only a few blocks west of Broadway you feel you ought to have put on a shabby suit and soiled linen and given a miss to cleaning your teeth that morning. You have to sidetrack off Fiftieth to find the Longmoor Apartments. I didn’t have any trouble. I have a good sense of smell.
    Once upon a time the Longmoor was probably a good second-best hotel. That would be around the time conservative brokers were bowling down Wall Street in open carriages. Right now it was a shabby, sprawling brownstone with paint coming off the woodwork and rust going on the ironwork. It ran tofive storeys and if you lived at the top you’d still know they were cooking cabbage in the basement.
    But they had quite a big reception hall. Behind the desk was a pert young woman of about twenty wearing a hairdo and calculated manner which constituted a prima facie libel on Miss Veronica Lake’s best pinup expression. Eyes that had grown prematurely old because they had seen too much stared out of the pixie-like face. She wore a low V-cut dress and leaned forward slightly in case I was interested. I wasn’t.
    But I had called in to pry some information or something out of the place and maybe the proprietor kept a padlock on his mouth. I ought to be glad the boss hadn’t put some pimply hard-faced male clerk behind that desk. So I brought out the Bogard charm and dusted it off. That baby-you’re-so-wonderful-I-can’t-believe-it look. It had never done a thing for me among the young ladies of my acquaintance, but you never can tell. It might look original to one who no doubt never got anything except the direct approach.
    Apparently it did. She tossed her near-platinum mane so that I could watch it slope back and let her eyes flicker. They were clear blue eyes. Too clear.
    I said, “I really came to see a friend who lives here, but now that I’ve seen you it doesn’t seem to matter….”
    â€œSay, I don’t know what you mean, but I’mpleased t’meetcha.” The vowels and consonants were strictly Lower East Side. She used both hands to give a smooth-down to the female contours. They were strictly dynamite in any territory.
    I leaned over the desk top and breathed into her right ear, “Did anyone ever tell you what lovely eyes you’ve got?”
    I don’t think I’d ever said anything so corny even in my collegiate days when I wore a raccoon coat and played a ukulele. But I was beginning to get embarrassed. Thirty-six is too old to start being a wolf. I ought to have a wife and kids and well-worn slippers by the fireside and solidly respectable neighbours instead of a lonely apartment and friends who lived on bourbon and their nerve-ends and kept me awake until seven in the morning talking intellectual moonshine. Just the nice, quiet marrying kind who never got around to it. Some home-loving girl missed a good man.
    The pathos of it would have touched me if Miss Lake II hadn’t done it first. She gave me a coy pat on the cheek. I let my arm slide around her waist. She wasn’t wearing a girdle. At