There was a fraction of a second’s hesitation. Then Bollo chuckled. “You sure learn things in a hurry, Mr. Atticus.”
“That’s what they pay me for.” The Bishop waved one thick hand at me. “Come on, Eddie. Let’s go talk to the girl.”
I followed him, saying: “She’s all upset now. And it’s two hours after our deadline. Why not wait until this afternoon?”
The Bishop didn’t even pay attention to me. “Her name’s Nancy Howell, old Wayne Howell’s daughter, and she was supposed to marry this man, McDonald.” He walked straight through the room with the bar, even though it had been a good half-hour since he had a drink. That meant the Bishop was excited. There was something here which had him more interested than any average murder should. He was thirty-five years past police reporting, and when he got interested in a case now there was plenty to it. I knew Ralph McDonald had been a prominent young business man, but it would take more than just that to make the Bishop forget a drink.
We stopped before a door at the end of the hall. “You talk to her,” the Bishop said. “The women always love to weep on your beautiful shoulder.”
“Aw, Bishop. I—”
“Go on, handsome.”
The one thing that really gets me is to be kidded about my face. A guy can’t help his face. I’d spent four years on the college boxing team hoping to get a bent nose or a cauliflower ear, but I never did. I said: “Now damn it, Bishop—”
“Ai God! If I had your face and my inclinations—”
It was a long room furnished as a lounge with red-leather upholstered chairs and sofas. Nancy Howell was half lying on one of the sofas and a couple of girls were hovering over her. She was reduced now to a sort of quiet sobbing.
I said: “Excuse me, Miss Howell, but I’ve found out what it was you saw at the window. It was John Bollo’s little monkey, that’s all. I thought you’d want to know.”
She was staring up at me. For a few seconds she wasn’t making any sound at all. She wasn’t even breathing. She said finally: “A monkey?”
She tried a small smile at me, although her eyes were still wet with tears and her lips quivery. “That must have been it. But it was such a shock. It was so... so horrible.”
“It must have been,” I said.
One of the other girls said I was awfully brave to go outside and look, and the other girl said she knew I was Eddie Edison and I was a reporter for the Democrat and her name and phone number was... I would have made a break for it then, but the Bishop was right there and I knew he wouldn’t let me scram. So I asked Miss Howell if she felt well enough to tell what had happened.
“I... don’t know. Maybe I ought to talk about it.” She made a queer little frightened movement and put her hand on my wrist. I sat down on the sofa by her. She was a pretty girl, about twenty-five but now she looked very young and feminine and hurt. Her hair was blond and her eyes were big and gray. “I... I’d just got here, and I was looking around for Ralph—”
The Bishop interrupted: “You’d just got here?”
She looked up at him and touched a handerkerchief to her eyes. “Yes. I wasn’t feeling well and I phoned Ralph at his office this afternoon that I wasn’t coming. But after I’d slept a while I felt better, so I dressed and drove out and I looked around for him and—” Her hands tightened on my wrist. She turned her little face toward me then and I could see she was trying to keep back the tears.
“I’d just met Ralph in the hall and we stepped into that room a minute ’cause he wanted to ask how I felt, and...” Her fingers dug into my wrist. “That’s when it happened!”
“You didn’t see anybody? Anything except that face at the window?”
“That’s all. I... I must have been too shocked to move.” She began to cry softly. “I still can’t believe it.”
It was then I remembered the ten thousand dollars. I asked if she knew whether or not Ralph McDonald had had the money with him.
“The ten thousand dollars the Civic Clubs collected to buy the land for the airport,” I explained.
“I don’t think so. He wouldn’t be carrying it in his pocket, would he?”
Out in the hall the Bishop dragged me through the crowd and into a corner. “Why’d you think McDonald had that airport money?”
On a paper the size of the Democrat a reporter has a lot of slush to cover besides his regular beat, and I had to write up all the Civic Club meetings as well as police stuff. In trying to bring the new addition to the government airfield to South City three of the clubs had collected enough money to buy the necessary land and donate it to the government. “Ben Steiner from the Rotary Club, Muddy Marshall from the Lions, and Ralph McDonald for the Junior Chamber were the treasurers,” I told the Bishop. “At their meeting tonight all the money was turned over to McDonald. I was there when they gave it to him.”
“What did he do with it?”
“He was to put it in his office safe until tomorrow when the banks open.”
There was a gleam in the Bishop’s eyes that I didn’t like. “Ai God!” he said. “Come on!”
“Bishop, now listen...”
He went over to the bar and had a drink and said he wanted a pint bottle of whiskey. Their whiskey was all in quarts and the Bishop made them pour a pint into a flat rum bottle they had. He stuck that into his pocket and started out. For thirty years the Bishop has drunk two pints of whiskey every night, and on special occasions such as this, he’ll double his quota. Yet he never buys anything but pint bottles. He says they fit his hand better. And besides, he says, if he was to ever start buying his liquor by the quart he might develop into a drunkard.
Chapter Two
10,001 Motives For Murder
Ralph McDonald’s real-estate office was on the second floor of a building on Commerce Street. The office door was locked. I said: “I told you it would be locked, Bishop.”
“We’ll go outside and climb up the fire-escape and get in the window. That’s a spring lock on the door. You can open it from the inside and let me in.”
I said: “There’s a law against that sort of thing. People get shot for breaking into houses.”
“Hurry up!” the Bishop said impatiently. “We ain’t got all night.”
“Damn it!” I said, and my voice was thinner than I meant for it to be. “I climbed out on that roof for you, and what happened? I almost broke my fool neck. Every time you bother with a murder case, something happens to me. Why don’t you stick to politics?”
“I am sticking to politics,” the Bishop said. “You just let me tend to my own business and I’ll tend to yours. Now hurry.”
“But if the window’s locked?”
“Then kick it out.”
“And have the cops up here by the time the glass hits the alley! You know what Lieutenant Browder’ll do if he catches me breaking in here. Even if he didn’t put me in jail for life I’d never get another spot of news out of him.”
“You let me worry about that prude. This thing is bigger than he is. Now get!”
I don’t know why I argue with him. The Bishop can always make me do his dirty work, somehow or other, and I know it. Besides, he had me excited now. I knew this was a first-rate murder story for South City though I still didn’t see the political angle that had Bishop Atticus so interested. But he’d said he was sticking to politics, and he’d said this was bigger than Lieutenant Browder — and I knew the Bishop didn’t lie about things of this kind. So I was excited.
But I was still scared.
It was black-dark in the alley. I felt my way along, stumbling over a stray tin can and making a noise that sounded to me like the bombardment of Rotterdam. I wondered if the cop on the beat would shoot me before I had a chance to yell and tell him who I was. And then I thought about the man who’d murdered Ralph McDonald and wondered if he could be close by. I remembered how very still and dead that one bullet had left Ralph. My stomach felt queasy and my hands were dripping sweat and I thought I heard something roaring down the alley toward me — then realized it was just the blood pounding in my ears.