Editorially the Morning Herald gave a summary of the dead man's short career as a civic reformer and expressed a belief that he had been killed by some of the people who didn't want Personville cleaned up. The Herald said the chief of police could best show his own lack of complicity by speedily catching and convicting the murderer or murderers. The editorial was blunt and bitter.
I finished it with my second cup of coffee, jumped a Broadway car, dropped off at Laurel Avenue, and turned down toward the dead man's house.
I was half a block from it when something changed my mind and my destination.
A smallish young man in three shades of brown crossed the street ahead of me. His dark profile was pretty. He was Max Thaler, alias Whisper. I reached the corner of Mountain Boulevard in time to catch the flash of his brown- covered rear leg vanishing into the late Donald Willsson's doorway.
I went back to Broadway, found a drug store with a phone booth in it, searched the directory for Elihu Willsson's residence number, called it, told somebody who claimed to be the old man's secretary that I had been brought from San Francisco by Donald Willsson, that I knew something about his death, and that I wanted to see his father.
When I made it emphatic enough I got an invitation to call.
The czar of Poisonville was propped up in bed when his secretary--a noiseless slim sharp-eyed man of forty-- brought me into the bedroom.
The old man's head was small and almost perfectly round under its close-cut crop of white hair. His ears were too small and plastered too flat to the sides of his head to spoil the spherical effect. His nose also was small, carrying down the curve of his bony forehead. Mouth and chin were straight lines chopping the sphere off. Below them a short thick neck ran down into white pajamas between square meaty shoulders. One of his arms was outside the covers, a short compact arm that ended in a thick-fingered blunt hand. His eyes were round, blue, small and watery. They looked as if they were hiding behind the watery film and under the bushy white brows only until the time came to jump out and grab something. He wasn't the sort of man whose pocket you'd try to pick unless you had a lot of confidence in your fingers.
He ordered me into a bedside chair with a two-inch jerk of his round head, chased the secretary away with another, and asked:
'What's this about my son?'
His voice was harsh. His chest had too much and his mouth too little to do with his words for them to be very clear.
'I'm a Continental Detective Agency operative, San Francisco branch,' I told him. 'A couple of days ago we got a check from your son and a letter asking that a man be sent here to do some work for him. I'm the man. He told me to come out to his house last night. I did, but he didn't show up. When I got downtown I learned he had been killed.'
Elihu Willsson peered suspiciously at me and asked:
'Well, what of it?'
'While I was waiting your daughter-in-law got a phone message, went out, came back with what looked like blood on her shoe, and told me her husband wouldn't be home. He was shot at ten-forty. She went out at ten- twenty, came back at eleven-five.'
The old man sat straight up in bed and called young Mrs. Willsson a flock of things. When he ran out of words of that sort he still had some breath left. He used it to shout at me:
'Is she in jail?'
I said I didn't think so.
He didn't like her not being in jail. He was nasty about it. He bawled a lot of things I didn't like, winding up with:
'What the hell are you waiting for?'
He was too old and too sick to be smacked. I laughed and said:
'For evidence.'
'Evidence? What do you need? You've--'
'Don't be a chump,' I interrupted his bawling. 'Why should she kill him?'
'Because she's a French hussy! Because she--'
The secretary's frightened face appeared at the door.
'Get out of here!' the old man roared at it, and the face went.
'She jealous?' I asked before he could go on with his shouting. 'And if you don't yell maybe I'll be able to hear you anyway. My deafness is a lot better since I've been eating yeast.'
He put a fist on top of each hump his thighs made in the covers and pushed his square chin at me.
'Old as I am and sick as I am,' he said very deliberately, 'I've a great mind to get up and kick your behind.'
I paid no attention to that, repeating:
'Was she jealous?'
'She was,' he said, not yelling now, 'and domineering, and spoiled, and suspicious, and greedy, and mean, and unscrupulous, and deceitful, and selfish, and damned bad--altogether damned bad!'
'Any reason for her jealousy?'
'I hope so,' he said bitterly. 'I'd hate to think a son of mine would be faithful to her. Though likely enough he was. He'd do things like that.'
