“Not a thing but a silk handkerchief. At least it felt like a silk handkerchief. I know damn well he didn’t have the money. I can’t figure why he socked me and ran.”
“Umn-n.” The Bishop rubbed one hand around the bald globe of his head. “Umn-n, you better be careful, Eddie. I don’t think so, but somebody might be willing to kill for that handkerchief. They might even be willing to kill you just because you know about it.”
He drove off and left me there staring after him.
I was still standing there, staring, when Nancy Howell came out of the Red and Black Club with John Bollo. She had stopped crying, but her face was pale and strained. Bollo had his arm around her waist and he was grinning. For some reason I didn’t seem to like that man.
They got in Bollo’s Packard and drove off.
After crawling out of bed, about two that afternoon, I went to Pete’s Restaurant for breakfast, and while downing my ham and eggs I read the afternoon Journal. They played the story up big. The murder shot, the Journal said had been fired from a distance of more than ten feet, from about the hall doorway probably. It was a small-caliber gun the exact caliber not yet known. The murderer had probably ducked out of an upstairs window and dropped from the porch roof to the ground. Moulage imprints had been made of tracks found in the flower beds, but in other places the grass came up to the edge of the house and would not hold prints. Ten thousand dollars which various Civic Clubs had collected to buy land to be given to the government for enlarging the air base was missing. It was believed stolen, but a thorough check had not yet been completed.
Sooner or later I had to go down to headquarters and face Browder, and I knew that by this time he probably was sure I had been in McDonald’s office before he got there. I wondered how much hell he’d give me, and on the chance that the Bishop might be at the paper and would go to headquarters with me, I went by the office. But he wasn’t there. The city editor’s book didn’t have anything special for me on it. I went by the jail and the courthouse and the fire-station for the day’s routine stuff. And finally I went on to headquarters.
As I was starting in the door Browder and a couple of plainclothesmen came out, walking fast. Browder saw me and his eyes got a hot glare in them.
He said: “I’m in a hurry, or I’d stop to talk to you. Be around when I get back.” It was distinctly an order.
I went into headquarters and back to what Browder liked to call The Laboratory, though South City had spent no fortune equipping it. The Journal reporter, Tommy Harris, was there with Bill Piker. Piker was a young cop, no older than I am, and Browder was training him as his “scientific assistant.”
Piker’s eyebrows went up when he saw me. “Browder went out just a minute ago. Boy does he want to see you!”
“I saw him leaving. What’s his hurry?”
“A patrolman down by the railroad phoned and said he thought he recognized Ben Steiner — on a freight train headed out of town.”
Tommy Harris said: “He was at the Black and Red last night when McDonald got killed, but nobody’s seen him since. He didn’t go home last night and about noon there was a report from his mother that he was missing. I think Browder’s got him tied up with the shooting and the ten grand somehow. And listen, what’s this you’ve done that’s got the lieutenant so hot under the collar?”
“Nothing.” I said. “Nothing. I’ll be seeing y’all.” And I left.
With Ben Steiner missing and maybe leaving town on a freight I didn’t want to have to answer Browder’s questions alone. I knew he’d take liberties with me which he wouldn’t take with the Bishop — even the governor is leary how he beards the Bishop. He’d got me into this, now let him get me out. I went back to the office.
I was heading down the hall for the newsroom when Mrs. Good saw me and called me into her office. Mrs. Good is the society editor. She is a gray-haired, rather handsome old lady with a firm jaw and bright dark eyes and she can outswear the British navy. The Anglo-Saxon words that even Hemingway characters are careful with are her favorites.
“Sit down, Eddie.” She leaned back in her chair, took a puff from a quarter-inch cigarette that she held between the blades of a huge pair of scissors, and said: “I’ve been sick all day because I didn’t go to that brawl. But how the hell could I know somebody was going to get murdered? Who killed the—?”
“I don’t know.”
“That Howell tart was in the room when it happened, wasn’t she?”
“She was talking to Ralph.”
“Then she killed him,” Mrs. Good said. “A damn wonder she hasn’t killed somebody before this. She’s done everything else.”
“She can’t be that bad. She’s a sweet-looking girl.”
Mrs. Good got the last possible drag out of her cigarette, flipped it into a spittoon and spat after it. Hers is probably the only society editor’s office in the country that has a spittoon in it. On the side next the wall was printed SOCIETY but you didn’t see that unless you turned the spittoon around. She said: “They all look sweet to you, Eddie. If all the tarts in the Junior League were as pious as the looks they get on their faces, the men in South City would be missing one hell of a lot of fun. Not that you make much use of your own face. Why don’t you get around more?”
I went back to the original subject. “Whoever killed Ralph McDonald,” I said, “probably did it for ten thousand dollars — though they must have stolen the money before they shot him. Maybe they knew that if he found it was missing he’d realize who took it. And you know Miss Howell wouldn’t shoot anybody for ten thousand bucks. She’s rich.”
“She hasn’t got a — nickel. Her father, old Wayne Howell, had pots of it, at one time or another, that he cheated people out of. But he didn’t have it when he died. Judge Jones just finished probating the estate a few weeks back. Wayne Howell owed half the folks in the state. That’s why Ralph McDonald decided not to marry her. That... wouldn’t do anything that didn’t add to his fortune.”
“Somebody told me they were going to be married, in just a week or two.”
“Somebody told you, but Ralph McDonald didn’t. He was trying to crawl out of that wedding. That’s why she killed him.”
It was a good theory. More than one man has been shot in South City because of broken engagements, but in this case I doubted it. Mrs. Good had been society editor so long, and has had to write so much sweetness-and-light that she reacts by always believing the worst.
The phone rang and Mrs. Good said: “Another old slut with some slop for my social cesspool.” But when she picked up the phone her voice changed entirely. It dripped honey. “Hell-oo.”
I heard the Bishop’s cane pegging down the hallway then and I jumped up and grabbed him as he went by the door. “We’re in a mess, Bishop! Lieutenant Browder knows we were at McDonald’s office last night and he probably knows Ben Steiner was there, and now Steiner’s missing! Vanished! They think he was seen leaving town on a freight train!”
“Well, well.” Bishop Atticus didn’t seem more than mildly interested. He waved his hand at Mrs. Good. “How are you this evening, Mrs. Good?”
She slid one hand over the mouthpiece, said: “Lousy as usual. Come on in and have a drink. I want to talk to you, too.”
The Bishop pegged past me to Mrs. Good’s watercooler, took a pint bottle out of his pocket, and broke the seal on it. With great deliberation he started mixing his two fingers of water and two of whiskey.