I could barely see the fire-escape against the sky. I reached up and got ahold of it and started to climb. The iron was rusty and sharp against my hands. It made little squeaking noises. But nobody shot at me and I reached the landing without trouble. I rubbed my hands on my trousers and got ready to go to work on the window.
The window stood wide open.
“Well, I’ll be damned!” I said. It was careless of a man to leave an open window on a fire-escape, especially with ten thousand dollars inside. But the weather was hot, and maybe the money hadn’t been left here after all.
I listened, and there wasn’t any sound. So I stuck one leg over the windowsill, and then my head. And that’s when the blow landed.
I thought I’d been shot. I thought the top of my head was blown off. I could feel myself falling and it was like falling through a sky full of exploding rockets of red and green and white with me turning over and over and over between them.
I must have struck the man across the knees as I fell, though I don’t remember it. I remember hitting the floor and then there was somebody on top of me who seemed to be having convulsions trying to get off. I started swinging wild, crazy blows. Something banged me in the eye. Then my left hand got tangled up in a man’s hair and I held on. I could tell from his hair where his chin should be and I let him have about four, one after another. I fought as a middleweight in college and I’ve put on seven or eight pounds since then and I was using them all. When I let go his hair there was a slumping noise as the fellow went limp on the floor.
I got up and groped my way across the office and opened the hall door. I was panting and I felt sick. I didn’t know if I was hurt badly or not.
“Hello,” the Bishop said. “Some kind of disturbance in here?” He pushed past me. “Where’s the light? I don’t want to bruise myself stumbling around in the dark.”
He switched on the light, closed the hall door, then turned around and looked at the man on the floor. He was a thin, wiry young guy with inky black hair and one of these dark, sensitive, intellectual faces. He was out cold.
“You know him?” the Bishop asked.
“It’s Ben Steiner. He and Muddy Marshall and Ralph McDonald were the three men who had charge of the funds collected by the Civic Clubs until the money was all turned over to McDonald.”
“Thought I’d seen him. Must be old Ben Steiner’s son.” The Bishop knew the father of everybody in South City under seventy years old.
He turned around slowly, pivoting as usual on his peg leg — sort of revolving around it. And halfway around he stopped. “Yep,” he said. “There it is.”
It was a safe and the door was wide open. There were a few scattered papers inside, but there was no ten thousand dollars.
“There’s your motive,” the Bishop said. “Ten thousand of ’em.” He limped over to a watercooler in one corner and put two fingers of water in a paper cup. He added an equal amount of whiskey from the bottle he’d brought and gulped it down. Then he refilled the paper cup with water and limped back and poured it on Ben Steiner’s face.
After a few moments Steiner got up. He brushed back his wet hair. His face was already beginning to swell and grow discolored. His eyes were hard and black, with no expression in them. I couldn’t tell what he was thinking, but I could tell he wasn’t afraid. He wasn’t any more afraid than the Bishop was.
The Bishop said: “Did you get the money?”
Steiner looked at him squarely. “No.”
“Who did get it?”
“I don’t know. How would I?”
“You came here looking for it.”
“I came to see if it was here. I was at the Red and Black Club when Ralph McDonald was killed and I was afraid it was because of the money. So I came to see if it was here.”
“Looks like you would have turned on the light so you could see better,” the Bishop said.
Ben Steiner just looked straight at the Bishop without answering.
I said: “Maybe we ought to search him, Bishop?”
There was a change in Steiner’s face then. I can’t explain it exactly because it wasn’t that much of a change — just a look in his eyes. Maybe he was getting afraid. Maybe he was making up his mind what he would do.
He said: “No, I’m not being searched. I don’t have the money, but I’m not going to be searched.”
“Hell,” the Bishop said. “We’re a couple of friends. We’re better than the cops.”
“No.”
The Bishop shrugged and started limping across the room toward the telephone. If he phoned the cops, we’d be in as tough a spot as Steiner, but he might have done it regardless. God would have a hard time trying to guess what the Bishop’d do.
When he picked up the phone, Steiner said: “All right. Search me. My wallet’s in my inside coat pocket.”
There was thirty-two dollars in it. I put it back and reached in his right trouser pocket and found fifty-five cents. In his left trouser pocket was a key ring and a half-package of mints. He wore a white cotton suit, without a vest. He had a watch in the watch pocket, a handkerchief in the hip pocket. He had another handkerchief in the breast coat pocket and in the left coat pocket was a half-package of cigarettes and two paper books of matches.
I stepped around on the other side of him and stuck my hand in his left coat pocket. This put me on the left side of him, and he had plenty of room for his right uppercut. I saw it coming, but it took me so completely by surprise I was still thinking about dodging when it landed. I stumbled backward, hit a chair, and went over on my fanny.
I sat there and I could see but I couldn’t get up. I saw Ben Steiner whirl and spring for the hall door. He snatched the door open and leaped through — and came down flat on his face in the hallway. The Bishop had tripped him with his walking stick.
But Steiner just hit and bounced. By the time I got to the hall he was down the stairs and gone. I went after him anyway. And halfway down the stair I stumbled. I didn’t fall. I just kept going faster and faster and I couldn’t stop. I managed to aim for the street door, though. It was open. As I went out somebody tried to come in and we both spilled like a ton of brick on the sidewalk
When I sat up and could see again I was looking at Muddy Marshall, the third of the three Civic Club officials who had known the money was in Ralph McDonald’s office safe. He was sitting in the gutter looking dazed and his nose was bleeding.
Behind me a voice said: “What happened? What’s the trouble here?”
I looked around and it was Lieutenant Browder, the pride of the South City police department.
I knew Browder wasn’t going to regard lightly the fact that I had broken into the office of a man who had just been murdered — an office out of which ten thousand dollars had been swiped. Browder never regards anything lightly.
“What happened?” he asked again.
I couldn’t think of anything to say, so I said: “Hello. Hello, Lieutenant.”
He said: “You’re both drunk. What are you doing here?”
I didn’t answer. Muddy Marshall wiped away the blood that was trickling from his nose and said: “I was just starting in the doorway when this man ran into me. I don’t know—”
He recognized me for the first time, blinking at me and looking drunk. “Oh, it’s you Edison. Why this violent and felonious assault?”