parked outside the front door or the gangling figure that got out of the driver’s seat and walked briskly around the front of the car toward the front door.
He hurried out and down the stairs and was two steps from the bottom when the chimes rang in the living room to his left. They sounded loud in the empty and silent house and a queer sort of tingle raced up and down his spine, and he sternly disregarded it as he went to the front door and pulled it open.
A tall man with thin features and cavernous eyes confronted him. He had alertly intelligent eyes and seemed perfectly self-assured as he looked at the young man in uniform and murmured, “Officer Smith? I’m the Press. Miami News.”
It was the first time Leroy had ever been addressed as “Officer Smith.” It was also the first time he had ever actually encountered a reporter from a big city newspaper. In a shaking voice, he said,
“Yes. I’m… Leroy Smith. Officer Leroy Smith,” he amended, getting some of the shakiness out of his voice.
“Rourke.” Timothy Rourke held out a thin hand and winced as the young man wrung it with unnecessary vigor. “Your chief of police said you were in charge here, and suggested I get a statement from you.”
“For the… Miami News? Say, you’re Timothy Rourke, aren’t you? I read your by-lined stories all the time in the paper. You want a statement from me?”
“Whatever information you’re at liberty to make public,” Rourke told him urbanely. “I got the impression from Chief Jenson that he fully expects you to come up with a solution to the murder.”
“Well, I don’t know about that,” Smith disclaimed halfheartedly. “I do have a few ideas, I guess. Come on in the house, Mr. Rourke. You want to go up to the bedroom where they found her?”
“Let’s look around down here first.” Rourke walked into the hallway and glanced through the door into the neat kitchen, and then into the living room on the right. “Is that the window where you think entry was made?”
“It was found unlocked and open a couple of inches. Everything else locked up tight. No fingerprints, though, and no foreign substances picked up from the floor inside by the special filter on my vacuum cleaner… so the findings are inconclusive. But there’s these two highball glasses in front of the sofa, Mr. Rourke. Fingerprints on one glass I’ve identified as belonging to the deceased… I don’t know about the others.”
“You mean she sat here and had a drink with someone before she got herself strangled?”
“Well, I… I guess she had a drink with someone all right. Don’t quote me as saying I think it was her murderer, though. More likely an innocent friend.”
“But you’ve photographed the prints just in case?” insisted Rourke.
The young policeman colored slightly. “I don’t have a proper fingerprint camera. But I did lift the prints with scotch tape and I have them for identification.”
“Excellent.” Rourke nodded emphatically and the young man glowed. The reported jotted down some notes on a wad of copy paper. “Leroy Smith. Is that right?”
“That’s right. I was all prepared to make a moulage of any footprints outside the window, you could say in your newspaper story if you want, but unfortunately it’s all gravel outside as you can see for yourself if you look.”
Rourke nodded absently and went back to the stairway after a last glance around the neat living room. “Upstairs, eh?”
“The room to the right at the head of the stairs.” Smith followed him up eagerly. “The other bedroom with connecting bath is their little girl’s room. Only six years old and she was sound asleep all the time. Didn’t know a thing until she woke up this morning and went to call her mother and found her lying there, in the middle of the bed, cold and dead. It makes me sick to think of it.”
“Had she been screwed?” Rourke asked callously as he stepped inside the bedroom and looked at the wide, smooth bed.
“I… I… don’t know,” stammered Leroy Smith behind him. “I didn’t even see her body, and I don’t know how one would determine a thing like that.”
“Any semen stains on the bed? You used ultraviolet, didn’t you? Or don’t you know…?”
“I am perfectly aware,” said the young man stiffly, “that an ultraviolet light will cause the stains of semen and other physiological fluids to re-emit energy in the form of visible light generally known as fluorescence. Semen, indeed,” he went on didactically to cover an inward confusion, “will generally show a rather bright, blue-white fluorescence. Unfortunately, though, we have no ultra-violet equipment on hand.”
Rourke shrugged and crossed the room to a large dressing table. “The doctor should be able to tell us that.” He picked up a double cardboard-framed photograph of a smiling man and a very attractive, calm-faced woman and studied it. “Is this a picture of the Blakes?”
Leroy Smith glanced at it and nodded. “Taken when they were married, I guess. Marvin looks just about the same today, but Ellie is… was… a lot prettier today than then.”
Rourke nodded slowly and closed the cardboard folder and tucked it under his arm. “I can use this in the paper.” He strode across the room to enter the bathroom and look around, then opened the door on the other side and glanced into Sissy’s room.
When he returned, Leroy Smith said hesitantly, “If you think you’d like a picture of me, Mr. Rourke, to run in the newspaper, I could get you one without any trouble just by stopping off at home for a minute. It shows me in my uniform and all.”
“Just exactly what I need,” Rourke told him enthusiastically. “We’ll caption it: Scientific Sleuth Goes Clueless.” He started briskly out of the room. “Now then: Tell me how to get to the Wilsson house. I understand that’s where the Blake child is staying until her father gets home from Miami this afternoon.”
“That’s right.” Leroy Smith hurried after him. “You go down to the end of this lane and turn to the right…”
8
In even the most ordinary circumstances Minerva Wilsson was an exceedingly voluble woman. Most of her friends indulgently agreed that she could talk more and say less than any woman in seven counties, and one homespun philosopher had opined sagely, “You just got to take part of what Minerva says with a grain of salt. It stands to reason there just ain’t that much truth in the world.”
That was in the most ordinary circumstances.
Today, of course, the circumstances were most extraordinary, and by eleven o’clock in the morning Minerva had broken all her own previous records for long-distance gabbing. Since seven o’clock when the news had begun to spread, her telephone had rung incessantly, and there had been a constant stream of callers to the Wilsson bungalow. If she had told it once she had told it forty times, each time with certain added dramatic highlights and embellishments which made for better listening and drew more gushing “ohs” and “ahs” and “do tells.”
“Right after six o’clock it was when the telephone started ringing and woke me spang up out of the soundest sleep I’d had all night. I just knew it was terrible news. Like a premonition, I guess you’d say. I’ve always been real sensitive like that, you know, ever since I was little. It was like it wasn’t the telephone at all, but the shrill screaming of a soul in deadly agony that woke me up. But I was out of bed and on my feet before I had time to think, and Harry just lying there on his back snoring peacefully through it all.
“Well, I tell you I just flew into the other room and grabbed up the telephone and said hello, and then I heard this tiny, little voice that seemed like it came from a far distance off, almost like it wasn’t real but came from some place not on this earth.
“And it said ‘Aunt Minerva’, and it was like it was crying but not quite crying either, but choked up and frightened and, well… tragic, that’s what it was. I can tell you it gave me a turn. I wasn’t quite all awake, I guess, and it was like it was part of a dream, but I knew I wasn’t dreaming. I remember standing there and distinctly thinking to myself, ‘I wish it was a dream, but I know it isn’t,’ and then this little voice said, ‘This is Sissy, Aunt Minerva. Mommy’s hurt bad. She’s sick, I guess. She’s lying in bed and won’t talk to me.’ That poor, dear lamb. Can you imagine?
“And I knew right then. I tell you I felt it in my bones. Don’t ask me how. I’m just psychic, I guess. And I
