He wrestled the doors shut and we ground our way up. He didn’t look at me anymore. When the car stopped and I got out he didn’t speak or look at me again. He just sat there blank-eyed, hunched on the burlap and the wooden stool. As I turned the angle of the corridor he was still sitting there. And the vague expression was back on his face.
At the end of the corridor two doors were alight. They were the only two in sight that were. I stopped outside to light a cigarette and listen, but I didn’t hear any sound of activity. I opened the door marked Entrance and stepped into the narrow office with the small closed typewriter desk. The wooden door was still ajar. I walked along to it and knocked on the wood and said: “Mr. Morningstar.”
No answer. Silence. Not even a sound of breathing. The hairs moved on the back of my neck. I stepped around the door. The ceiling light glowed down on the glass cover of the jeweler’s scales, on the old polished wood around the leather desk top, down the side of the desk, on a square-toed, elastic-sided black shoe, with a white cotton sock above it.
The shoe was at the wrong angle, pointing to the corner of the ceiling. The rest of the leg was behind the corner of the big safe. I seemed to be wading through mud as I went on into the room.
He lay crumpled on his back. Very lonely, very dead.
The safe door was wide open and keys hung in the lock of the inner compartment. A metal drawer was pulled out. It was empty now. There may have been money in it once.
Nothing else in the room seemed to be different.
The old man’s pockets had been pulled out, but I didn’t touch him except to bend over and put the back of my hand against his livid, violet-colored face. It was like touching a frog’s belly. Blood had oozed from the side of his forehead where he had been hit. But there was no powder smell on the air this time, and the violet color of his skin showed that he had died of a heart stoppage, due to shock and fear, probably. That didn’t make it any less murder.
I left the lights burning, wiped the doorknobs, and walked down the fire stairs to the sixth floor. I read the names on the doors going along, for no reason at all. H. R. Teager Dental Laboratories, L. Pridview, Public Accountant, Dalton and Rees Typewriting Service, Dr. E. J. Blaskowitz, and underneath the name in small letters: Chiropractic Physician.
The elevator came growling up and the old man didn’t look at me. His face was as empty as my brain.
I called the Receiving Hospital from the corner, giving no name.
15
The chessmen, red and white bone, were lined up ready to go and had that sharp, competent and complicated look they always have at the beginning of a game. It was ten o’clock in the evening, I was home at the apartment, I had a pipe in my mouth, a drink at my elbow and nothing on my mind except two murders and the mystery of how Mrs. Elizabeth Bright Murdock had got her Brasher Doubloon back while I still had it in my pocket.
I opened a little paper-bound book of tournament games published in Leipzig, picked out a dashing-looking Queen’s Gambit, moved the white pawn to Queen’s four, and the bell rang at the door.
I stepped around the table and picked the Colt .38 off the drop leaf of the oak desk and went over to the door holding it down beside my right leg.
“Who is it?”
“Breeze.”
I went back to the desk to lay the gun down again before I opened the door. Breeze stood there looking just as big and sloppy as ever, but a little more tired. The young, fresh faced dick named Spangler was with him.
They rode me back into the room without seeming to and Spangler shut the door. His bright young eyes flicked this way and that while Breeze let his older and harder ones stay on my face for a long moment, then he walked around me to the davenport.
“Look around,” he said out of the corner of his mouth.
Spangler left the door and crossed the room to the dinette, looked in there, recrossed and went into the hall. The bathroom door squeaked, his steps went farther along.
Breeze took his hat off and mopped his semi-bald dome. Doors opened and closed distantly. Closets. Spangler came hack.
“Nobody here,” he said.
Breeze nodded and sat down, placing his panama beside him.
Spangler saw the gun lying on the desk. He said: “Mind if I look?”
I said: “Phooey on both of you.”
Spangler walked to the gun and held the muzzle to his nose, sniffing. He broke the magazine out, ejected the shell in the chamber, picked it up and pressed it into the magazine. He laid the magazine on the desk and held the gun so that light went into the open bottom of the breech. Holding it that way he squinted down the barrel.
“A little dust,” he said. “Not much.”
“What did you expect?” I said. “Rubies?”
He ignored me, looked at Breeze and added: “I’d say this gun has not been fired within twenty-four hours. I’m sure of it.”
Breeze nodded and chewed his lip and explored my face with his eyes. Spangler put the gun together neatly and laid it aside and went and sat down. He put a cigarette between his lips and lit it and blew smoke contentedly.
“We know damn well it wasn’t a long .38 anyway,” he said. “One of those things will shoot through a wall. No chance of the slug staying inside a man’s head.”
“Just what are you guys talking about?” I asked.
