Trouble in Rooster Paradise Read Online Free Page A

army. He became an
embittered civilian and an even meaner cop who waged his war on the
many Seattle criminals unlucky enough to get in his way before the
defeat of the Axis powers. We’d first met in the late ’30s, when I
was a neophyte detective working for the Bristol Agency under the
tutelage of Lou Boyd. Frank and Lou didn’t exactly get along. Lou’s
wit didn’t meld well with Frank’s boorishness. But I respected
Milland’s expertise and ignored his bad manners. We didn’t really
become anything resembling friends until after the war.
    Milland pointed to purse spillings near where
Christine’s body had dropped.
    “ Your business card was bent double
and crammed in her compact. Looks to me like she wasn’t too excited
about remembering you. Was she one of your dissatisfied clients?” Milland asked me. “Something she tell you that might tie
in with this massacre?”
    “ No,” I said, shaking my head. “No,
to both questions.”
    “ We didn’t find no money or
identification on the girl,” said a big-toothed uniformed cop
standing off to the side. “Looks to have been a robbery.” He then
added a “maybe,” with a nervous glance at the
detectives.
    Milland shook his head as he looked at the
body. “A messy robbery,” he said. “If that’s what it really
was.”
    “ Girl’s name and address?” This
question came at me from Milland’s partner, Bernie Hanson, a
middle-aged man with a weather-beaten face and a vacant stare.
Hanson had the voice of a radio newscaster doing an ad for a
funeral parlor. He held a pencil in one hand, a notepad in the
other.
    “ Christine Johanson,” I said. I
could only remember the street number. “She lived with an Aunt
Emelia. I didn’t meet the aunt.”
    “ So, how’d you happen to meet up
with this gal?” Milland asked, pointing to the body.
    I told them the story.
    When I’d finished, Hanson asked, “Get a look at
the driver of that Packard?”
    “ No. I just shook the guy for
her.”
    “ It seems he didn’t stay shook,”
Milland murmured, giving me a level stare.
     
    Walter and I rode in mortuary silence back to
Mrs. Berger’s. We walked through the kitchen side door at one a.m.
At least that was what the kitty-cat wall clock read—though it
tended to run slow. The cat’s moving eyes signaled each tick; its
pendulum tail wagged like an inverted metronome. That and the
refrigerator’s hum were the only sounds to hail us. I shut and
locked the door as quietly as I could.
    A plate of inky black blobs sat on the drain
board. Waxed paper sheltered them. It was Mrs. Berger’s latest
cookie experiment. She’d decided to call them Nightmare Drops. As
volunteer guinea pigs, Walter and I each grabbed one.
    We glided through the pantry and dining room
and hopped, stepped, and tiptoed past Mrs. Berger’s bedroom door.
We were lucky. It was shut and she didn’t stir—telltale signs she’d
dosed herself with sleeping powder.
    Light broke through the window at the bottom of
the stairs, accenting my landlady’s shrine to her bump and grind
days. A display case of mahogany was mounted on the wall. It
contained her prized fans, manufactured by the famous theatrical
costumer Lawrence Sittenberg of New York City. They were made from
tail feathers wrenched from ostriches in Capetown, South Africa,
then tinted and attached to celluloid handles. Alongside the case
hung three framed photos linked like comic-strip panels. Each
showed a younger Mrs. Berger working her fans in different stages
of her act—billiard ball naked, save for rouge, high-heeled
slippers and a G-string that was more thread than string. If she
caught you looking at her pictures—which you couldn’t help but do
when mounting those stairs—she’d holler over something like, “Sally
Rand was a piker next to me, am I right? If my Otto hadn’t taken me
from the life, I’d have been the big name,” or, “I kept them
spellbound and comin’ back for more. Such verve and flourish I