"Kenneth Robeson - Doc Savage 173 - Once Over Lightly" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robeson Kenneth)

He grinned faintly, examined me with more interest, and whistled his approval brazenly. “If I thought
being sensible would get me anywhere with you—”

“There's a man dead,” I said.

“Uh-huh. It happens every—” He paused, his head jutted forward and down and turned sidewise. “You
levelling?”

“He's dead.”

“Natural death?”

“I wouldn't say so.”

“Where?”

“Here in the—I can't get used to calling this silly-ranch a hotel,” I said. “His name was Loring. Waldo
Loring.”

He nodded and said, “Oh, that. Yes, I heard one of the guests had been killed in an accident.”

Accident. That was right. That was what the hotel had said it was, which was about the only normal thing
I had seen about the hostelry so far—hoping to make their guests think a murder hadn't been committed.
So they had said it had been an accident.

“The accident,” I said, “was an Indian warclub. It happened several times to his head. There was quite a
change made.”

He considered this, and there were some subtle changes in his manner, somewhat as if a racehorse had
heard the rattle of fast hoofbeats.

“Now I want to talk to Doc Savage,” I said.

“I'm Monk Mayfair. I'm Doc's right hand and catch-all. Won't I do?”

“Listen I've told you—”
“Oh, all right, but you'll just get tossed into the wastebasket, and I'm the latter. Doc is on a vacation out
here.” He paused and looked at me thoughtfully. “I guess you won't be satisfied until he tells you that
himself, though.”

He went away, leaving me in the living room of a suite which was clearly one of the larger ones. I looked
around for a stuffed buffalo or the equivalent, and was peering behind things when Monk Mayfair
reappeared and asked dryly. “You hunting something?”

“Stuffed bison,” I said. “But I suppose you'll do for a substitute.”

After he scratched his head without thinking of a reply, he escorted me into another room where Doc
Savage was making a coffee table and room-service breakfast look small by sitting before them.