All The Way Read Online Free

secretary to some businessman in Louisiana,” I said. “Don’t give me that.”
    “I am,” she said. “Or was, rather. However, let me finish this dossier. Correct me if there are any errors. Your full name is Jerome Langston Forbes, you’re usually called Jerry, you’re twenty-eight, and you are from Texas—at least, originally. You’re single. You drink moderately but you gamble too much, and at least twice you’ve been involved in a messy affair with a married woman. You attended Rice Institute and the University of Texas, but didn’t graduate from either. I believe it was some trouble over a crap game at Rice, and you left the University of Texas to go into the Navy during the Korean war. You don’t appear to be the plodding type of wage-earner, to say the least. Since your discharge from the service in nineteen fifty-three you’ve owned a bar in Panama, written advertising copy for two or three San Francisco agencies, been a race-track tout, and at the time you got into this brawl in Las Vegas you were doing publicity for some exhibitionist used-car dealer in Los Angeles. Is that fairly accurate?”
    “Except for a minor point,” I said. “I wasn’t the racetrack tout; I was the man behind him. I made him. It was a public-relations deal. But never mind that. How’d you find out all this?”
    She smiled. “You’ll love this. From a private detective.”
    “But for God’s sake why? And where was it I saw you before?”
    “Miami Beach,” she said. “Six days ago.”
    “Oh. Then you were staying—”
    She nodded. “At that same Byzantine confection you were. The Golden Horn.”
    The Golden Horn was one of those chi-chi motels in the north end of Miami Beach that really aren’t motels at all except that you can park your own car if you want. I didn’t have a car, of course; I’d stayed out there merely because they were less expensive than the big places. I thought of it now, trying to remember when I’d seen her.
    “It was by the pool,” she said. “You were trying to pick up some girl from—Richmond, I believe.”
    I frowned. “I remember the girl, all right. Silver blonde with a seven-word vocabulary. Priceless, hilarious, hysterical—I can’t remember the other four. But I don’t know why I’m so vague about seeing you. As attractive—”
    “Competition, perhaps,” she said. “The pool side is not my terrain. Nor the beach. I’m too thin.”
    “You’re entitled to your own opinions,” I said. “Don’t try to brain-wash me. I still say I’d have noticed you. I could spot the line of that head a hundred yards—”
    “I had my hair up, and I was wearing a swimming cap,” she said crisply. “Now, if we’re through discussing my visibility, or lack of it, would you care to know what I was doing?”
    “That one I’ve already figured out. You were listening.”
    She gave me an approving glance. “Right.”
    “But why? What was it about my voice? If you’re a talent scout for Decca, I can’t sing a note.”
    For the moment, let’s just say your voice has a certain unique quality that interests me. And it might make you a great deal of money.”
    “How?” I asked.
    I can’t tell you right now; maybe I won’t at all. I don’t know. But at any rate you know now why I started investigating you—especially after I began to suspect your name wasn’t really George Hamilton.”
    “What tipped you off about that?” I asked. “I thought I was pretty careful.”
    “Pure chance,” she replied. “It just happened there was a man named Forbes registered there at the same time—”
    “Oh,” I said. “Sure. I remember now. And he was paged, there by the pool. But, dammit, I wouldn’t have believed it was that obvious.”
    “It wasn’t,” she replied. “On the contrary, you recovered beautifully. I wouldn’t have noticed it if I hadn’t been looking right at you. Naturally it made me wonder, since I’d just heard you tell the girl your name was Hamilton. I