She stood up behind her desk and walked to the office doorway. The technicians were in a corner on the floor arguing. The man had opened the shallow drawer in the middle of the desk. He was putting the package in the drawer.
“You said on the desk,” she said firmly.
“Did I? They told me in the middle drawer.”
“Who told you?”
“Over at the station.”
“Do you work there?”
“Sure, I work there.”
The two technicians had stopped to listen. “Does this man work over at the station?” she asked them.
They shook their heads. “I’ve never seen him.”
“Me either.”
“Let me see what you’ve got there,” Miss Principi asked boldly and walked toward the man, hand outstretched.
It was then five o’clock.
Miss Principi tried futilely and quite bravely to block the man’s way. He thrust her back against the desk. She screamed once as he went into her office and, running after him, screamed again as he hurried out into the corridor. She felt faint and had to sit down. She bent over with her head between her knees and kept saying, “That’s the one! That’s the one!”
When one of the technicians hurried out into the corridor, the elevator had already started down. By chance, the elevator had been there, waiting for him. At one minute of five the starter on the main lobby floor always sent one car to the top and two others to sixteen where the Transit Mutual Insurance Company offices were, so as to facilitate emptying the building at the five o’clock rush.
Patrolman Walter Conroy, Traffic Detail, stood in the lobby of the Shannon Building, waiting for a chance to have a word with his young wife, a pregnant keypunch operator who was working her last month with Transit Mutual.
He saw a man in a gray suit plunge out of the elevator, thrusting the office girls aside and knocking one sprawling on her hands and knees on the tile floor of the lobby.
“Hey, you!” Conroy roared, indignant at the thought that the jerk could just as easily have knocked down Marie Conroy. The man gave him a frightened look and sprinted for the big doors. To a cop that meant stop him. He hit the sidewalk ten feet behind the smaller man, holster unsnapped, Police Positive in his hand.
“Halt,” he yelled in approved fashion.
The man had run out from under his hat. A man picked it up and stood holding it. The running man looked back. Conroy aimed the revolver at him, not intending to fire, hoping that the visual effect would be impressive.
The man cut sharply to his left, ran between two parked cars and directly into the path of a panel delivery truck. The front right fender of the truck boosted him, and the right post of the windshield hit him solidly. The blow knocked the man into the row of parked cars. He sprawled across the hood of one and slipped back into the road.
The truck screeched to a stop. Conroy slowed oncoming traffic. People ran toward the scene from all directions. Conroy kept the crowd back, got his call in, quieted the truck driver down. He looked at the man, at the sickening distortion of the body, and knew that the man could live only through a miracle.
“He’s trying to say something,” the truck driver said, plucking at Conroy’s sleeve. Conroy went down on one knee.
The mouth worked in the ruined face. Conroy leaned closer. “Put it... in pocketbook... elevator... midnight.”
“What?” Conroy demanded.
“Midnight,” the man said. And could speak no longer.
Conroy stood up. “Out of his head,” he said officially. The ambulance came whining through the streets and stopped. The man was efficiently gathered up. Conroy took the truck driver over to the sidewalk to get the rest of the information.
An official car swung in and parked. Conroy recognized Sergeant Dumont from the Special Section.
Dumont marched up to them, eyes simian-deep under the harsh black brows. “What goes on here?”
“A guy came running out of the elevator, knocking a girl down. I tried to stop him and he ran right in front of that truck. The ambulance just took him away. He was hurt bad, may be dead already.”
“Who are you?”
“Conroy. Traffic.”
“I want to find you right here when we come back out of that building.”
“Okay.”
Dumont and his partner were gone fifteen minutes. Conroy made the nervous truck driver stay, too. Dumont, when he returned, planted himself in front of Conroy.
“Okay. Description.”
“Just... just a normal-looking guy. Gray suit. Brown hat.”
“Here’s the hat,” the truck driver said. “A fellow give it to me after the ambulance left.”
Dumont took it and looked at the band.
“I got his name and address off his wallet,” Conroy said. “It was Howard Elser, 1881 Bernice Street.”
“I’ll take that,” Dumont said. “I want to know about a package he had.”
“I didn’t see any package,” Conroy said.
“He didn’t have no package,” the truck driver said.
“Was it something he stole?” Conroy asked.
“Shut up. Did he have a chance to get rid of the package?”
“After he came out of the elevator? No. I had my eyes on him every minute. Wait a minute, Sergeant. He said something. I thought he was just talking nonsense, you know like they do.”
“Well, what did he say?”
“Something about putting something in a pocketbook in the elevator. It didn’t make much sense then, but if he had a little package like you say...”
Dumont looked beyond Conroy. Conroy thought the expression on the sergeant’s face was most peculiar.
“Did he say anything else?” Dumont asked him in a surprisingly soft voice.
“He said ‘midnight.’ He said that twice.”
“Mother of Mary,” Dumont said. He whirled and ran for the official car.
“Can I go now?” the driver asked.
“Yes. Go on. Get going.”
Conroy had missed Marie. He walked back to his corner, turned off the traffic signals, and took his position in the middle of the intersection. As he hustled the traffic along, one part of his mind was busy wondering what the hell was going on. He knew it had to be something special to unhinge the legendary poise of Sergeant Bernie Dumont. It was then quarter to six.
Lieutenant Brian Rome was the head of Special Section. He was an angular black-haired man of thirty, full of nervous, restless energy, with a gift of ingenuity and improvisation. In the Department of Public Safety and in the Police Department itself he was looked on as a man who would very probably head up the department at some time in the future.
When the department had been completely reorganized three years before, it had been Rome who had sold Chief Pepper and sold the Commissioner of Public Safety on the idea of creating a Special Section — a grab-bag section which would take on those one-shot duties which did not properly belong to the regular sections, such as Traffic, Homicide, Robbery, Vice, Identification, Lab, and so on. When a special project came up, Rome could take the necessary personnel from those sections which, at the moment, were best able to spare the men.
The threat made against Charles Walker Wylie’s life had been classified at once as a special project, and turned over to Brian Rome. He had talked with Wylie on Thursday evening, copied down Wylie’s schedule for the day, warned Wylie to adhere to it, and had requisitioned the number of men he felt necessary to guarantee Wylie’s safety. Though he did not tell Wylie, Rome was quite aware that if a determined man wanted to kill Wylie, he could probably manage it, no matter how much police protection was given him. Brian Rome felt that it was a crank threat. He anticipated no trouble on Friday. He would cut the protection on Saturday to two men, and, in view of Wylie’s position and importance, keep those two men on for a full week before taking them off.