They straightened quickly, conferred briefly. Then one man dashed off in the car again; the other stayed by the body. The man on guard waved up at us, as if in affirmation.
“I’m going on down,” the youngest of the men beside me said. The other two went after him with alacrity, cutting across Sixteenth Street and the backyards of the houses in the next block to reach the stairs that go down to Water Street near the capitol. I turned, and there was Mrs. Garr paddling after.
“Mrs. Garr!” I called, running to catch her. “You can’t go down like that! Not in your nightgown! Not in your bare feet!”
She halted at the edge of the yard, with my hand on her arm.
“Why, I hain’t got my clothes on,” she grumbled in bewildered discovery. Her white hair was whipping about her face; long streamers of it were loose from the tumbled knot on top of her head. She scuttled for the house.
“Wait’ll I get my clothes on! Don’t you go on down before I get my clothes on!” she commanded.
I wasn’t anxious to go down; the rail was close enough for me. In the short interval I had spent running after Mrs. Garr, the policeman below quickly had his hands full; people were streaming out of the Water Street houses to crowd the scene, fall back, crowd forward again as he ran back and forth, pushing them away.
“Stand back there, stand back!” I could hear his shouts, rebounding against the concrete wall.
Up Water Street, running, came the three men from Mrs. Garr’s house. As they neared the group below new sirens cried. An ambulance and two more police cars sped ruthlessly through the crowd; people scattered back momentarily, pressed forward again. Uniformed men spilled from the cars.
“What is it? What were the sirens for? Where’s my husband—where’s Mr. Waller?” the fat woman’s breathless voice asked beside me.
“There’s a man down there, dead,” I answered, looking up only to see that the other inmates of the house were there, too, now: the department store clerk, Mr. Grant, Mrs. Tewman. “Your husband went down there with the others.”
The men below turned the body over. There was a moment of quiet, then hubbub again. Faces lifted, looking upward at us. I moved back from the rail.
The fat woman screamed. “Joe! They’re taking him!”
“Your husband? Why, that’s—” I began. It was true. “But look! The other men, too. They’re all getting in one of the cars.”
The car holding the men from Mrs. Garr’s house sped back toward the capitol.
“Wait! Watch where the car’s going. It’s coming up here!”
“Joe!” the woman wailed.
In the crowd below there was active movement now; I saw photographers’ tripods, the body being lifted to a stretcher.
A car screamed to a stop beside the house. The three men from the house and as many policemen came out of it, walked in a group toward us. Mr. Waller cried:
“It’s a dead man all right. He was shot. But he fell down that hill, too. And they figure he must have fell or been pushed down that concrete drop from just about here!”
—
THE DEAD MAN HAD fallen from up here! Involuntarily I looked over the rail again, shuddering at the drop.
“Stand back from the rail there!” one of the policemen ordered peremptorily. He waved us away as the other two officers began examining the concrete paving and the rail. “Go on back to the house, all of you. Get in that house, there! I’m going to want some statements, and I don’t want to miss anybody.”
We crowded through my rooms into the hall. Mrs. Garr, fully clothed now, was just emerging from her cubbyhole.
“What you comin’ in here for?” she asked the officer angrily.
“Man fell or got pushed over that rail right in back of this house,” the man explained impatiently. “You run this joint?”
“I’m the owner of this prop’ty.”
“Good. Tell me who all lives here.”
“All nice, respectable people.”
“I don’t care what the heck they are; I’ll find that out. Their names I want.”
Mrs. Garr listed us, one by one.
“Okay. Now, which one raised the alarm?”
“Mrs. Dacres—that’s my new lodger—called it in. That’s Mrs. Dacres. She lives right there in the back.”
“All right, Mrs. Dacres, how’d you come to discover this body?”
“After I’d been up a little while I went outdoors because it was such a nice morning,” I explained. “I walked as far as the rail and looked over; at first I thought that was just a heap of clothes thrown out there, but then I saw it wasn’t a heap of clothes.”
“Uh-huh. You know anything about this guy getting thrown over?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Hear anything out back last night?”
“No.”
“Any shots?”
“No.”
“Any cars backfiring?”
“No, I can’t remember any.”
“Where was you from seven o’clock last night until this morning?”
I detailed my commonplace activities.
He merely grunted at the end, and left me.
One by one he questioned the others. Everywhere the answers were the same. No one had heard anything unusual or seen anything unusual. The three men who had seen the body up close claimed that they had never seen the man before, and signed statements to that effect. Mr. Tewman came in the front door as the inquisition was in full swing; he was a rabbity little blond man in his forties, who said he had been working in his hamburger castle all night, had just come home to sleep. He was completely at sea as to what had happened, but was enlightened by eight voices at once.
The policeman finally snapped his notebook shut.
“I’m not gettin’ anywhere with this,” he said. “Looks like a gang killing to me, anyhow. All of you that didn’t see the body this morning will need to report down at the morgue sometime during the day and see if
