at the same time stepped aside and pressed myself against the wall. We both waited and listened, but nothing happened. Through the open door drifted the strong, acid smell of cordite. I edged forward to peer into the room.
Slap in the middle of the floor lay a man. His legs were curled up under him, and his hands were clenched into his chest. Blood came through his fingers, ran down his wrists and on to the floor. He was a man around sixty, and I guessed he was Freedlander. As I looked at him, he gave a choking sigh and his hands flopped on the floor.
I didn’t move. I knew the killer must be in there. He couldn’t have got away.
Kerman sneaked into the living-room behind me and flattened himself against the other side of the door. His heavy .45 looked like a cannon in his fist.
“Come on out!” I snarled suddenly. My voice sounded like a buzz-saw cutting into a wood knot. “And with your hands in the air!”
A gun went off and the slug ploughed through the doorway, close to my head.
Kerman slid his arm around the door and fired twice. The crash of his gun rattled the windows.
“You can’t get away!” I said, trying to sound like a tough cop. “We’ve got you surrounded.”
But this time the killer wasn’t playing. There was silence and no movement. We waited, but nothing happened. I had visions of the cops arriving, and I wasn’t anxious to be involved with the Frisco cops: they were much too efficient.
I motioned to Kerman to stay where he was and sneaked over to the window. As I pushed it up, Kerman fired into the room again, and, under cover of the noise, I got the window open. I leaned out. A few feet away was the window of the inner room. It meant getting on to the sill, stepping across to die other sill with about a hundred-foot drop below. As I swung my leg out of the window I looked back. Kerman’s eyes were popping and he shook his head at me. I jerked my thumb to the next window, levered myself on to the sill.
Someone let off a gun from below and the slug splashed cement into my face. I was so startled I nearly let go of my hold, looked down into the street at the up-turned faces of a sizeable crowd. Right in the centre was a beefy-looking cop, taking aim at me.
I gave a strangled yell, flung myself forward and sideways, lurched against the window of the next room and crashed through the glass to land on all fours on the floor. A gun went off practically in my face, and then Kerman’s cannon boomed, bringing down a chunk of ceiling plaster.
I flattened out, wriggled desperately to get behind the bed as more shots shook the room.
I had a sudden vision of a dark, snarling face peering at me over the top of the bed, and a vicious blue nose automatic pointing at my head, then the hand holding the gun disappeared with a crash of gunfire and reappeared again as a spongy, red mess.
It was my pal the Wop with the dirty shirt. He gave a howl, staggered to the window as Kerman rushed at him. He hit Kerman with the back of his hand, dodged past him and ran out of the door, through the other room and into the passage. More gunfire broke out; a woman screamed: a body thudded to the floor.
“Watch out!” I gasped. “There’s a gun-happy cop out there. He’ll shoot as soon as look at you.”
We stood still and waited.
But the cop wasn’t taking any chances.
“All out!” he bawled from behind the door. Even from that distance I could hear him breathing. “I’ll blast you to hell if you bring out a rod.”
“We’re coming,” I said. “Don’t excite yourself, and don’t shoot.”
We moved out of the room and into the passage with our hands in the air.
Lying in the passage was the Wop. He had a bullet-hole through the centre of his forehead.
The cop was one of those massive men, big in the feet and solid bone in the head. He snarled at us, threatening us with his gun.
“Take it easy, brother,” I said, not liking the look of him. “You have two stiffs on your hands already. You don’t want two more.”
“I wouldn’t care.” he said, showing his teeth. “Two or four makes no difference to me. Back up against that wall until the wagon arrives.”
We backed up against the wall. It didn’t take long before we heard the wail of a siren. Two white-coated figures came panting up the stairs, together with a representative group from the Homicide Bureau. I was glad to see Detective District Commander Dunnigan was with them. He and I had done business with each other before.
“Hello,” he said, and stared at us. “This your funeral?”
“Very nearly was,” I said. “There’s another stiff inside. Could you tell this officer we’re not dangerous? I keep thinking he’s going to shoot us.”
Dunnigan waved the copper aside.
“I’ll be out to talk to you in a moment.”
He went in to look at Freedlander.
“He’s a pal of ours,” I told the copper who was glaring at us. “You should be more careful who you shoot at.”
The copper spat.
“I was a mug not to have rubbed you two punks out,” he said in disgust. “If they had found me with four stiffs maybe they would have made me a sergeant.”
“What a charming little mind you have,” Kerman said and backed away.
III
We started hack to Orchid City at five o’clock after a couple of awkward hours in Detective District Commander Dunnigan’s office. He had done his best to dig into a case that kept snapping shut every time he thought he had worked the lid off, but he hadn’t succeeded.
My story was straightforward, and more or less true. I said Freedlander’s daughter had been missing for a couple of years. This he was able to check by calling the Missing People’s Bureau in Orchid City. I told him I had found her wandering the streets suffering from loss of memory, and, having taken her to my secretary’s apartment, had immediately got in my car to come to ‘Frisco to take Freedlander to her.
He wanted to know how I knew she was Freedlander’s daughter, and I said I read the Missing People’s Bulletin the police circulated and remembered her description.
He stared bleakly at me for some minutes, wondering whether to believe me or not, and I stared right back at him.
“Should have thought you had better things to do,” was his final comment.
I went on to tell him how I had arrived at Freedlander’s apartment, heard a shot, broke in, found Freedlander dead and the Wop trying to get away. I said he fired at us and we fired at him and handed Dunnigan our gun permits. I said maybe the Wop was a burglar. No, I didn’t think I had seen him before, although I might have. All Wops looked alike to me.
Dunnigan had a sneaking feeling there was much more behind all this than I was telling him. I could see that plainly on his big, square-shaped face. He said so.
I told him he must have been reading too many detective stories, and could I go now as I had a lot of work to do?
But he starred in from the beginning again, probing, asking questions, wasting a lot of time, and finally finishing up just where he had started. He looked like a baffled bull as he sat glaring at me.
Luckily the Wop had taken Freedlander’s money and his gold watch: the only things of value in the apartment, so it was a perfect set-up for a routine shoot-and-run stick-up. Finally, Dunnigan decided to let us go.
“Maybe it was a stick-up,” he said heavily. “If you two birds hadn’t been in on it, it would have been a stick- up, but you being there makes me wonder.”
Kerman said if he worried about a little case like this, he would be an old man and retired before he got to
