They sifted through the customer list exhaustively, with the help of additional data supplied them by the company’s records. There wasn’t anyone down on it who couldn’t have used three hundred dollars. The mere fact that they had bought the appliances on time instead of outright was evidence enough of that. The majority, after a preliminary floundering brought about by nervousness, were able to pass muster on their movements.
Meanwhile the days were adding up to weeks, and suddenly it was a couple of months and still the thing was unsolved.
The captain of detectives under whom they were working gave them all a light talk one night. Probably his own superiors had been riding him. Moreover, the Sol-Ray Company, Allroyd’s firm, had pointedly offered a reward on its own account for the capture of their agent’s murder, which looked suspiciously like a dig at the police.
“Now get out after it or there’s going to be a shaking-up around here that’s gonna change the color of some of you people’s clothes before you know it!” He pounded the top of his desk mercilessly. “I want whoever killed that man Allroyd! I want him brought in here, d’ye hear me? If you can’t work together, then work separately, but dammit, work! The man that brings him in here first stands a good chance of promotion. I’ll recommend him for it myself!”
They drifted out of his office grousing in low voices, “You’d think we done nothing but sit and twiddle our thumbs, the way the old man talks. You’d think we were holding out on him purposely. What does he expect us to do — pull the guy out of our hats?”
Bill Brown, for once, had nothing to say, Greeley noticed. He looked glum, like when you see something desirable slipping through your fingers. He had a hard, remorseless glint in his eyes, and a little later he was missing. No one knew where he’d gone.
Greeley, on his part, went and took another shot at the Ruth Crosby apartment. He had, of course, absolutely no illusions as to just what kind of a place it was, but that had nothing to do with this.
Mrs. Crosby, summoned by the colored girl, greeted him with a mixture of sulky annoyance and patient resignation. He asked her a few routine questions, but there was nothing he could really get his teeth into.
“I’ve told you men already,” she sighed, “I bought the lamp outright, for spot cash. This collector of theirs never had occasion to call here, I never set eyes on the fellow from first to last. Wait a minute — I’ll get you the receipted bill.”
She’d already shown them that long ago, so he tried to dissuade her, but she seemed to want him to see it again, for some reason that he couldn’t fathom. “That’s all right, I understand,” she said drily as she went out.
She came back again a minute later and handed him the receipt. It was folded around the outside of a small bulky envelope, and there was money in the latter. How much, he didn’t trouble to find out.
He said, “You’ve made a mistake, haven’t you?”
“That’s for you to say.”
“Well, I say you have. Watch yourself or you’ll get in trouble. Real trouble!”
She saw that she actually had tipped her hand, and became a little frightened, he could see. Both the bill and the money envelope vanished as if by sleight-of-hand. “I... I thought somebody’d been talking to you,” she faltered.
“Who, for instance?” he asked, dangerously intent.
“Oh... er... I don’t know, one of your teammates, maybe,” she floundered.
He couldn’t resist saying, “So you already made another of those little ‘mistakes.’ Only that time it wasn’t.”
“It pays to stay in with people,” was all he could get out of her.
IV
He got back to the precinct house in time for the bombshell. It burst at the captain’s telephone and spread in a widening circle of excitement from mouth to mouth, from room to room.
“Brown’s got the Allroyd murderer! Single-handed. He just phoned in! He’s on his way over with him now.”
“Who is he?” Greeley asked. No one seemed to know.
The captain came hustling through just then with another man, spotted Greeley in the anteroom, jerked his head at him to follow them. They got in a car and streaked off.
“Who is it, Cap?” Greeley asked again.
The captain either didn’t know yet himself or was too excited to answer. “If I had a few more like him working under me—” he muttered.
“We’d be too good for just one squad,” the other man finished for him.
“Well, no danger of that happening!” the captain squelched him.
They started to taper off in their headlong rush as they neared their destination. It seemed to be a small one-family house occupying just one corner of a big empty plot. It was sparsely built-up out here, and the street lighting was poor. But before they reached it a man suddenly stepped out of the darkness ahead into the path of their lights, flagged them to stop. It was Bill Brown. He was alone.
The police car skidded to a violently broadside to him, braked. The three of them spilled out around him.
“Where is he?” the captain almost screamed. “I thought you said you were bringing him in. Did he get away?”
“No, he didn’t get away.” Brown spoke with difficulty in a low, panting voice as though he still couldn’t get his breath back. He had a dazed or rather a blankly disappointed look, in his eyes. He was holding his gun in one hand, his new hat in the other. It had a bullet hole through the crown.
“He’s over there in the lot.” Brown said. “He broke out a gun.” He held the hat up, looked at it. “It was him or me.”
The captain swore. He said, “Well, we got him anyway, and that’s something.” Then he added hastily, “Are you sure he was our dish, Brown?”
Bill Brown met their eyes unwaveringly in the brightness of the head-beams. “He confessed,” he said, “and I found the Allroyd money on the premises.”
He turned and struck out into the darkness, across the sidewalk and into the hollows of a weed-grown lot, that had a footpath running through it diagonally, from near the house to the opposite corner. They followed him single file. Greeley thought, as he stumbled over a loose stone, “What’d he bring him through here for? This was asking for something to happen.”
The sound of low weeping, of a woman moaning in distress, reached them from the darkness ahead. There was somebody huddled on the ground there, two somebodies. Bill Brown’s torch flicked on, and the other man with them raised a distracted woman to her feet. Greeley had never seen her before. There was still somebody on the ground, motionless among the weeds. The torch pointed downward, and it was the doorman from the building where Allroyd had been murdered, with a black thread of blood bisecting his forehead.
Brown spoke, in the unassuming voice of one who expects to be complimented. “I had my eye on him for quite some time. Someone had to go in there after Allroyd, and no one had. We proved that. I think we all developed a blind spot in the case of this man, sort of overlooked him from the beginning. Just because a tenant insisted he’d been in sight the whole time, airing her dog below. Well, he had. She was telling the truth of it. Only, the other day I happened to ask her, ‘Who returned your dog to you when the airing was over? Did you go down and get it or did he bring it up to you?’ ‘Why, he brought it up to the door, of course,’ she said. Don’t you see, that’s when he did it — right while the dog was still with him, on his way to return it to its owner. How long would it take? We musta missed that because it was so obvious, and kept looking for something unusual.” He reached into his inside coat-pocket. “And here’s the money, to cinch it. Where would a doorman get this much, and why would it be hidden where I found it?”