Louise's Blunder Read Online Free Page B

of notches. ‘Just touch her,’ I said. Ada reached out a hand and patted the chick’s head. ‘She’s so soft and tiny,’ she said.
    ‘I think we got a healthy batch,’ I said, placing the frantic chick back in the cage with her sisters. ‘We’ve only lost one. And there’s just one rooster.’ We’d requested all hens but it was difficult to sex baby chicks and the seller couldn’t guarantee every chick was a female. We’d have the rooster for Sunday dinner once he began to crow and annoy the neighbors.
    The pathologist lit a cigarette after he pulled a sheet over the victim’s head.
    ‘So, doc, what’s the scoop?’ Detective Royal said. ‘Did he drown, or what?’
    ‘Oh, he drowned all right,’ the pathologist said. ‘His lungs and airway are full of water. But I can’t say for sure it was an accident.’
    Royal stubbed out his own cigarette on the steel examining table before pulling a narrow notebook and pencil from his topcoat pocket.
    ‘Why do you say that?’ he asked.
    ‘Well,’ the pathologist answered. ‘It’s the lump on the back of his head that concerns me. His skull was fractured. Now he could have fallen and hit his head on a rock and rolled into the water. The shoreline of the Tidal Basin is sloped and lined with rocks. Or he could have been blotto, there’s some alcohol in his bloodstream. But it could also be that he was intentionally hit on the head and thrown into the water.’
    ‘You can’t tell if he got the head injury before or after he went into the water?’
    The pathologist shook his head. ‘That’s not within my power. Sorry.’ He flicked off the bright examining light and flung the stark morgue into dimness. The only natural light in the room came from a tall glass window with a red stained-glass cross embedded in it. The red shaft of light lit up the long room of refrigerated metal drawers that lined the morgue wall opposite the window.
    Royal stopped taking notes. ‘Seems to me that this can’t be an accident since his pockets were empty. Where was his wallet?’
    ‘That’s your area of expertise, not mine,’ the pathologist said. ‘Your fingerprint guy was here earlier by the way, he said he got good prints.’
    ‘Yeah,’ Royal said, ‘we sent them off to the FBI. Their fingerprint girls are the best. If his are on file we should know within a week.’
    Royal was an old-fashioned detective, trained long before the FBI had begun to analyze blood and hair and laundry marks. He knew that once the victim was identified all he had to do was retrace the victim’s previous twenty-four hours to find out what had happened to him. It wasn’t always easy, but it worked.
    ‘Churchill arrived today,’ Henry said, helping himself to a steaming bowl of Dellaphine’s chicken and dumplings. ‘I read he’s staying at the White House, not at the British Embassy with the rest of the delegation.’
    ‘I’m surprised by that,’ Phoebe said. ‘Eleanor Roosevelt cannot stand the man. He drinks all day, and those awful cigars!’
    Churchill and an assortment of British lords, admirals and generals, including Lord Louis Mountbatten, had just arrived in Washington for the Trident Conference to plan an invasion of Europe. In April the American and British navies had driven the Nazi submarine fleet back to its den at Saint-Nazaire for good, clearing the Atlantic for allied transport and supply ships. It was time to make plans to conquer Italy, bomb Germany into dust and take Europe back from the Nazis. That was one reason the Reading Room was jammed with OSS staff. They were answering queries coming in by the hour from the American delegates to the Trident Conference.
    Every single power involved in this war desperately wanted to know what the Americans and British were discussing at Trident, even their allies. Obviously the conference was the target of dozens of spies. Which might be why OSS Security was so interested in the files Paul Hughes had been