He’d arrived back at his own doorway from the opposite direction by now. He slackened a little, hesitated, on the point of going in and letting the paper go hang. Then he went on anyway. “I’m out now. It’ll just take a minute longer. There and back.” Trifle.
The delivery truck had just arrived. He saw the bale being pitched off the back to the asphalt; for the dealer to pick up, as he rounded the corner once more. By the time he’d arrived at the stand the dealer had hauled it onto the sidewalk, cut the binding, and stacked the papers for sale on his board. A handful of other customers who had been waiting around closed in. The dealer was kept busy handing them out and making change.
Gary Severn wormed his way in through the little cluster of customers, reached for a copy from the pile, and found that somebody else had taken hold of it at the same time. The slight tug from two different directions brought their eyes around toward one another. Probably neither would have seen the other, that is to look at squarely, if it hadn’t been for that.
It was nothing. Gary Severn said pleasantly, “Go ahead, help yourself,” and relinquished that particular copy for the next one below it.
“Must think he knows me,” passed through his inattentive mind. The other’s glance had come back a second time, whereas his own hadn’t. He paid no further heed. He handed the dealer his nickel, got back two cents, turned and went off, reading the headlines as he went by the aid of the fairly adequate shop-lights there were along there.
He was dimly aware, as he did so, of numbers of other footsteps coming along the same way he was. People who had just now bought their papers as he had, and had this same direction to follow. He turned the corner and diverged up into his own street. All but one pair of footsteps went on off the long way, along the avenue, died out. One pair turned off and came up this way, as he had, but he took no notice.
He couldn’t read en route any more, because he’d left the lights behind. The paper turned blue and blurred. He folded it and postponed the rest until he should get inside.
The other tread was still coming along, a few yards back. He didn’t look around. Why should he? The streets were free to everyone. Others lived along this street as well as he. Footsteps behind him had no connection with him.
He reached his own doorway. As he turned aside he started to drag up his key. The other footsteps would go on past now, naturally. Not that his mind was occupied with them. Simply the membranes of his ears. He’d pulled out the building street-door, had one foot already through to the other side. The footsteps had come abreast—
A hand came down on his shoulder.
“Just a minute.”
He turned. The man who had been buying a paper; the one who had reached for the same one he had. Was he going to pick a quarrel about such a petty—
“Identify yourself.”
“Why?”
“I said identify yourself.” He did something with his free hand, almost too quick for Gary Severn to take in its significance. Some sort of a high-sign backed with metal.
“What’s that for?”
“That’s so you’ll identify yourself.”
“I’m Gary Severn. I live in here.”
“All right. You’d better come with me.” The hand on his shoulder had shifted further down his arm now, tightened.
Severn answered with a sort of peaceable doggedness, “Oh no, I won’t go with you unless you tell me what you want with me. You can’t come up to me like this outside my house and—”
“You’re not resisting arrest, are you?” the other man suggested. “I wouldn’t.”
“Arrest?” Severn said blankly. “Is this arrest? Arrest for what?”
A note of laughter sounded from the other, without his grim lips curving in accompaniment to it. “I don’t have to tell you that, do I? Arrest for murder. For the worst kind of murder there is. Murder of a police-officer. In the course of an attempted robbery. On Farragut Street.” He spaced each clipped phrase. “Now do you remember?”
Arrest for murder.
He said it over to himself. It didn’t even frighten him. It had no meaning. It was like being mistaken for Dutch Schultz or — some sort of a freak mix-up. The thing was, he wouldn’t get to bed until all hours now probably, and that might make him late in the morning. And just when he was so tired too.
All he could find to say was a very foolish little thing. “Can’t I go inside first and leave my paper? My wife’s waiting in there, and I’d like to let her know I may be gone for half an hour or so—”
The man nodded permission, said: “Sure, I’ll go inside with you a minute, while you tell your wife and leave your paper.”
A life ends, and the note it ends on is: “Can I go inside first and leave my paper?”
On the wall was a typical optician’s sight-chart, beginning with a big beetling jumbo capital at the top and tapering down to a line of fingernail-size type at the bottom. The detectives had been occupied in trying themselves out on it while they were waiting. Most, from a distance of across the room, had had to stop at the fourth line below the bottom. Normal eyesight. One man had been able to get down as far as the third, but he’d missed two of the ten letters in that one. No one had been able to get down below that.
The door on the opposite side opened and the Novak woman was brought in. She’d brought her knitting.
“Sit down there. We’d like to try you out on this chart, first.”
Mrs. Novak tipped her shoulders. “Glasses you’re giving out?”
“How far down can you read?”
“All the way.”
“Can you read the bottom line?”
Again Mrs. Novak tipped her shoulders. “Who couldn’t?”
“Nine out often people couldn’t,” one of the detectives murmured to the man next to him.
She rattled it off like someone reading a scare-head, “p, t, b, k, j, h, i, y, q, a.”
Somebody whistled. “Far-sighted.”
She dropped her eyes complacently to her needles again. “This I don’t know about. I only hope you gentlemen are going to be through soon. While you got me coming in and out of here, my business ain’t getting my whole attention.”
The door opened and Gary Severn had come in. Flanked. His whole life was flanked now.
The rest of it went quick. The way death does.
She looked up. She held it. She nodded. “That’s him. That’s the man I saw running away right after the shots.”
Gary Severn didn’t say anything.
One of the detectives present, his name was Eric Rogers, he didn’t say anything either. He was just there, a witness to it.
The other chief witness’ name was Storm. He was a certified accountant, he dealt in figures. He was, as witnesses go, a man of good will. He made the second line from the bottom on the chart, better than any of the detectives had, even if not as good as Mrs. Novak. But then he was wearing glasses. But then — once more — he’d also been wearing them at the time the fleeing murderer had bowled him over on the sidewalk, only a few doors away from the actual crime, and snapped a shot at him which miraculously missed. He’d promptly lain inert and feigned death, to avoid a possible second and better-aimed shot.
“You realize how important this is?”
“I realize. That’s why I’m holding back. That’s why I don’t like to say I’m hundred per cent sure. I’d say I’m seventy-five per cent sure it’s him.”
“What you’d like to say,” he was cautioned, “has nothing to do with it. Either you are sure or you aren’t. Sureness has no percentages. Either it’s one hundred or it’s zero. Keep emotion out of this. Forget that it’s a man. You’re an accountant. It’s a column of figures to you. There’s only one right answer. Give us that answer. Now we’re going to try you again.”