Free The Kissed Corpse by Brett Halliday Page A

my house … all of you. If you want to accuse me of murdering my husband, get out a warrant and arrest me. Until you’re ready to do that I don’t want to see any of you around here again.”
    Her face was white and her lips seemed swollen, drawn away from her teeth. Burke and I went out the front door into the sunlight while Chief Jelcoe backed away, protesting that she should be interested in helping discover who murdered her husband.
    â€œWhy should I be?” Her shrill voice carried out to us in the front yard. “I’m not weeping any tears over him. He got what he’s been asking for. Whoever shot him probably had a good reason. Don’t ask me to help you.”
    Jerry Burke looked at me with twinkling eyes while Jelcoe backed hastily out the front door.
    â€œShe certainly doesn’t give a damn who knows how she feels about the whole thing,” I suggested.
    Burke nodded. “She’s on the verge of hysteria. I’d say she isn’t responsible.…” His voice trailed off into silence as Jelcoe came up, sputtering indignantly:
    â€œShe’ll be a surprised widow if I do come back with a warrant. She was here by herself yesterday afternoon, with no alibi and every chance in the world to have pulled the job. A stolen pistol! I wonder who she meant by ‘that Yates wench’?”
    â€œMiss Laura Yates,” Burke told him with a smile. “She lives in an apartment in the 3800 block on Tularosa. She’s the last person known to have seen Leslie Young alive.”
    Jelcoe’s jaw sagged and both his eyelids did a hula dance. “Is she the one Young met up the canyon?”
    Burke nodded. “Her apartment hasn’t been searched for lethal weapons.”
    Chief Jelcoe went trotting toward his car. Looking after him, I asked:
    â€œDo you suppose he’ll find the pistol?”
    â€œNot in Laura Yates’ possession. If she did steal a .25 automatic and kill her paramour with it, she’s too cagy to leave it lying around for Jelcoe to find. Come on. We’re going up the canyon where X marks the spot.”
    As he drove down to the paved road he asked casually: “What do you make of her?”
    I knew he meant Myra Young. It wasn’t an easy question to answer. I honestly didn’t know what to make of her. I said: “She doesn’t bother to put on any outward semblance of grief.”
    â€œShe didn’t yesterday … even when we first brought news that her husband had been murdered.”
    â€œYet, she’s supposed to have been jealous of him,” I argued. “A woman isn’t jealous of a man she doesn’t love.”
    Burke drove slowly, his expression one of preoccupation. “I got the idea yesterday that she has been hanging onto Leslie for some time, knowing it was a losing game … knowing that he cared, temporarily at least, for someone else. I felt, somehow, that it was more of a relief to her than anything else to suddenly realize that the struggle was ended and she didn’t have to keep on trying to stave off what she knew was inevitable.”
    There was a culvert just ahead. A gully flattened out into the wooded valley. We both knew that spot. Burke slowed crossing the culvert, turned to the right on a little-used road, drove into a clump of trees and stopped.
    We looked around wordlessly for a minute or two. Then I said, “This is where Laura Yates met him,” more to myself than to him. The grass was badly trampled but there was still a rusty splotch of blood where Young’s body had lain. I was still thinking that a man had been kissed, marked with a cross … murdered, when Burke said:
    â€œNo use wasting time here. Jelcoe and his human bloodhounds have been over every inch of the ground. If there’d been a clue, Jelcoe wouldn’t have missed it. He does get the facts.”
    He led the way beyond the shaded spot into bright sunlight. I stopped