“That, precious, is something your little shell-like ears shouldn’t hear.”
And he walked into the inner office, taking the papers with him. He sat in his swivel-chair, put his feet on the desk, turned to the sporting page, browsed through the headlines, turned back to the front page.
The telephone rang.
He called out to Miss Vaiclass="underline" “I’ve got it, Helen,” and scooped the receiver to his ear, holding the newspaper in one hand, the telephone in the other.
The shrill, piping voice of Sam Parks came over the wire.
“Listen, is this Corning, the lawyer?”
“Yes.”
“Okey. This is Parks. I was in to see you this morning about my wife. Listen, I know why they’re trying to give her the works. I can’t tell you over the telephone. I’m coming over. You be there?”
“Come right away,” said Corning.
“Yeah!” shrilled Parks excitedly, and banged the receiver into place. Ken Corning hung up, turned to the paper. There was a frown creasing his forehead. He looked at his watch. It was five minutes to four. Street noises came up through the open window. The afternoon was warm, the air laden with the scents of late summer.
Ken’s eyes drifted unseeingly to the front page of the newspaper. Why should so much stir be made over the matter of a commonplace woman in a third-grade speakeasy giving some money to an officer who held out his hand for it? Why should a raid be made on a place where the officers hadn’t collected enough information to know who was running the place, and had let the husband slip through their fingers?
He stared at the newspaper, let his forehead crinkle in thought, and tried to fit the ends of the puzzle together.
Minutes passed.
The clock on the city hall boomed the hour of four, and the big gilt hands crept around until the minute hand marked the quarter hour.
There was the sound of a truck backfiring in the street.
Something came trebling up through the window, the scream of a child, or of a very frightened woman. Then there was the sound of rubber tires, skidding into a turn on pavement, the shout of a man.
There was a second of silence, and then the noise made by many voices, the sound of feet running on cement. A siren wailed in the distance.
Ken Corning, lost in contemplation, did not interpret the significance of those sounds until the siren had become a scream, until the clanging bell of the ambulance sounded almost directly beneath his office window, and until the door of his private office opened and Helen Vail stared at him.
“There seems to have been a man hurt,” she said.
Ken Corning put down the paper and went to the window. Helen put her hand on his shoulder as they leaned out. Corning was conscious of the touch of her hair against his cheek, the pressure of her hand on his shoulder. He slid his right arm out, around her waist.
They looked down upon the street.
There was no traffic. Such vehicles as were on the street were stalled. Men swarmed about like busy ants, moving in seething disorder. An ambulance was backing towards the curb. A uniformed officer was clearing a path for it. Stalled cars, their motors running, belched forth thin smoke films which made the air a light blue color.
A black circle of men were not moving. They were grouped about something which lay on the sidewalk. From that form there was a dark stain which had welled along the cement until it trickled in a thin, sluggish stream into the gutter.
The man was big and fat. He was lying on his back.
“Good heavens!” said the voice of Helen Vail, “it’s the man who was in the office.”
Ken Corning swung from the window. He reached the doorway of the private office in three strides, and gained the stairs. He went down them two at a time. He reached the sidewalk as the men were loading the stretcher. He pushed his way through the crowd. Men muttered comments, turned and stared at him, growled warnings to watch what he was doing. Corning paid no attention to them.
He reached the inner circle, saw the stretcher bearers heaving against the weight of the bulk that they strove to place in the ambulance.
Parks had been shot twice. To all appearances he was dead. The bullet holes welled a red trail which dripped from the stretcher. The eyes were half open and waxy. The skin was like discolored dough. The hands trailed limply at the ends of dangling arms.
One of the stretcher bearers spoke sharply.
“Give us a hand here, some of you guys!”
Ken Corning pushed through the circle as two of the spectators swirled forward. A uniformed officer also bent to give a lift. Corning asked a question: “Who saw it? How did it happen?”
Men stared at him with blank curiosity. He was hatless, wandering about asking how it had happened, and men regarded him as a part of the incident which had broken into the routine of their daily life. They watched him with that expression of impersonal curiosity with which fish in an aquarium stare at spectators who press against the glass tank.
On the fifth repetition of the question, a man gave an answer.
“I saw it. He drove up in an automobile and parked the car. He started walking along the street. The guy that shot him was in a roadster. He pulled right in to the curb, and he didn’t drive away until he was sure the guy was dead. The first shot smacked him over. He shot again when the guy was on the cement. I seen him twitch when the second bullet struck!”
Corning led the man to one side.
“Drove up in a car, eh? Which car?”
He indicated the line of parked machines.
The witness shrugged his shoulders. “I ain’t sure. I think it was the flivver over there. I remember that it was a car that had a smashed fender, You know, there wasn’t no reason why I should notice him until...”
“Yes,” said Corning, “I know. Now you want some advice?”
The man looked at him with curious eyes.
“Huh?” he asked.
“Get away from here and don’t tell your story to a soul. Go to headquarters, get the homicide squad’s office and ask for Sergeant Horne. He’s on the square. Tell your story to him, and ask that your name be withheld. Otherwise, if you got a good look at the man that did the shooting, you might find yourself parked on a marble slab. Killers don’t like witnesses.”
The man’s face paled. “Gee,” he said; then, after an intervaclass="underline" “Gee whiz!”
He spun on his heel, started walking rapidly away. From time to time he glanced over his shoulder.
His tip gave Ken Corning the chance to be the first man to examine the light car with the bent fender.
He looked at the registration certificate which was strapped about the steering post of the car. That showed the machine was registered in the name of Esther Parks, and the address which was given was the same address as that of the place which had been raided when the woman was arrested.
Ken felt of the seat. It was still warm.
He noticed an afternoon newspaper lying on the floorboards. He picked it up. There was nothing else on the inside of the car to give any inkling as to who had driven or owned it. Ken felt in the flap pocket of the right-hand door. His groping fingers encountered a lady’s handkerchief, a pair of pliers, the cap from an inner tube, and a bit of pasteboard. He pulled out the pasteboard.
It was red, bearing the insignia of the police department. It was, he found when he deciphered the scrawled lines which were placed in the printed blanks, a ticket for parking within fifteen feet of a fire hydrant on Seventh Street, between Madison and Harkley. The time was checked at three-forty five, of that day.
Ken pocketed the ticket and walked around to the front of the car, inspecting the dent in the fender. There was but little paint left upon the nondescript car which Parks had been driving. That little paint had been cracked and chipped where the fender had crumpled. And, on the tip of that crumpled fender, was a spot of bright red enamel, evidently taken from the car with which the flivver had collided.