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Octavus Roy Cohen
THE CORPSE THAT WALKED
Complete and Unabridged 
1951
 
3THE CORPSE THAT WALKED
Chapter One
THE SKATING pond at Rockefeller Center was crowded.Hundreds of the idly curious gazed down at a gay scene: ascene of action and color, of skaters who whirled and spun in thecenter of the smooth gray surface, of others who stroked methodi-cally about the edges of the rink.There were old people and young people and even children;there were experts and beginners, there was grim concentration onthe task of skating, and there was laughter from the lips of thosewho had mastered a degree of the art and were no longer worriedabout the elementary problem of remaining upright.This was a skating pond like no other skating pond in theworld. It was backgrounded by tall, austere, and massively hand-some buildings that stretched up and up and up into a clear Decem-ber sky. It was bathed in the soft glow of cleverly contrived lights.At each end there was a restaurant where people sat warmly andcomfortably and viewed the merrymaking through huge glasswindows.Some of the better skaters wore startling costumes: youngladies in extremely abbreviated skirts that showed attractive legs tobest advantage; young men who wore black tights and close-fittingshirts. But the great majority skated in their street clothes.Gail Foster and Alan Douglas did. They wore the sameclothes in which they had been working all day.She was only a few inches more than five feet in height.You’d look at her the first time without particular interest, and thenyou’d look again and say, “There’s a pretty girl.” She was that sort:slender and attractive and intelligent-looking. Her sports costumeof dark-blue woolen skirt, twin sweaters of pale yellow, and dark-blue beret did nothing to conceal a slim but unmistakably femininefigure. She skated well; surely and smoothly and easily. She skatedbetter than the tall man who stroked along beside her, his handsclasped in hers.About Alan Douglas you’d say, “He’s a nice-lookingfellow.” You wouldn’t say that he was handsome, because hewasn’t. But he was the sort of man you’d feel instinctively that itwould be pleasant to know. His six feet of muscular body was clad
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