The Ace of Spades - Dell Shannon Read Online Free

last
Wednesday. He had been six feet one inch tall, around a hundred and
seventy pounds, and between twenty-six and thirty years of age. He
had a medium-fair complexion, black hair, and brown eyes; not much
dental work, an excellent set of teeth— no scars or birthmarks—
blood type O. His fingerprints were being checked in their own
records and in Washington, to try to identify him.
    But all that was the least interesting of what
Bainbridge had to say. "The body," so the report went on,
"bore at least two dozen puncture marks in the areas which a
drug addict most commonly uses for injections— both arms and
thighs. However, when I came to examine these areas in detail, it was
evident that none of these had in fact penetrated an artery, or much
below the first layers of the epidermis."
    "Well, well," said Mendoza. He called
Hackett in and got Dr. Bainbridge on the inside phone. "This
corpse. The one with the puncture marks. What did you think about
that?"
    "Did you haul me away from work just to ask
that? I should've thought even a lieutenant of detectives could
reason from here to there. The obvious deduction is that he was not
an addict. Maybe somebody wanted to make it look as if he was, or
maybe it was him, I wouldn't know—people do damned funny things.
Maybe he committed suicide and those marks are relics of where he
kept trying to get up his nerve. You get that kind of thing, of
course."
    "Yes, but heroin's not a very usual method. And
why and where would he get hold of any if he wasn't an addict? And
why and where did he get that knock on the head?"
    "That's your business," said Bainbridge.
    "Well, you examined the body pretty thoroughly—
"
    "I did. I'll tell you this, Luis. In the
ordinary way, an autopsy wouldn't have uncovered that about those
puncture marks. No reason to— er— go into such detail. But I
happened to notice that not one seemed to have left any cyanosis—
he was very well preserved, of course the clothes had helped, and he
was on his back, so all the natural death-cyanosis had settled there—
and you'd ordinarily expect to find local cyanosis, black-and-blue
spots to you, around the most recent of the punctures. And a few
others which had faded some, being older. You know, what always shows
up on any user. A real mainliner, he's giving himself a jolt two or
three times a day, and pretty damn clumsily too— even if he uses a
hypo instead of the teaspoon method, he leaves bruise marks. Well, I
noticed that, and I investigated, and I think all those marks were
made about the same time, and after he was dead, or just before."
    "Now isn't that interesting!" said Mendoza.
"I presume the body's still in the morgue— "
    "Did you think I'd take it out to Forest Lawn
and bury it myself?"
    "What I meant was," said Mendoza patiently,
"you're done with it, you're not doing any further research?
It's on file, ready to be looked at by anybody who might know it?"
    "Complete with replaced organs and roughly sewn
together, yes. Don't tell me you want a complete analysis of
everything."
    "But I do, I do, amigo. Please. If possible,
what he had for his last meal, any chronic diseases, any foreign
bodies or inflammations, any suspicious differences from other
bodies, etcetera. Look at everything."
    Bainbridge uttered a howl of protest. "But, my
God, there's no reason! We know he died of heroin, and after all this
time there won't be much else— "
    "You go and look. What kind of injection was it,
by the way? Could it have been a normal dose?"
    "You know as well as I do how that varies— it
could have been. A pretty big one to be called that, but the kind of
jolt a lot of users take."
    "Mmh. Well, you go and look." Mendoza put
down the phone and grinned at Hackett. "I knew that dolphin had
something to say to us, Art. This corpse is a bit more mysterious
than you thought."
    "So it seems," said Hackett, still reading
the autopsy report. "I'll be damned. But it can still be an
ordinary business, Luis. His first