“If you look close, Owl Eyes, you can see the fuzz of lead along one side. The luck of Nicholas Glennan was working; I ripped open his pocket, and half the torn paper of matches comes out.”
“But,” cried Dave, “that’s no sign he’s there!”
“He took a suit from Adamic’s store, or I don’t know where else. And do them second-hand guys leave matches lying around in the pockets of their suits? No, Macushla. He gathered that up today since he’s been on the loose. And not in no one-arm restaurant, but likely enough in a hotel room.”
The inspector said, “Get your squad together, Dave. Tell Rhineheimer to get his.”
“Yes, sir. But... God... you can’t raid the whole hotel. It’s got twenty-two hundred rooms!”
“We cannot. But we can soon get a list of the folks who registered today, and their room numbers. And after that, in case we run up against a snag, your kid brother that once was a sparrow cop in a park — well, he’s got an idea. And I’ve observed that his ideas are apt to be good.”
“What is this idea that he has, inspector?”
For reply, Nick displayed some very small, silvery fragments in the palm of his big hand. They were egg-shaped bits crusted with a strange and frosty deposit, and none of them was longer than three-quarters of an inch. “Over there on the sidewalk, beside that alley,” his polite voice announced.
“Them!” snorted Dave Glennan. “Them! What the hell! What’s the worth of those? Nicholas, why don’t you turn in your badge and gun, and become a member of the white wings? You scavenger, you.”
“Well,” said Nick, “I’ve seen them before. And many of them.” He dropped the fragments into his vest pocket.
“We’re a-wasting time,” Inspector Bourse announced.
The chambermaid — Number Seventy-two, she was, of the Aberdeen Hotel — had plenty of nerve. Really she didn’t need a lot of nerve, since she wasn’t compelled to place herself within the range of direct gunfire. When Nicholas Glennan tapped softly upon the door of Room 1661, and an answering bark came from inside, the woman controlled her quivering throat adequately.
She crouched close beside the thick wall and said, “Chambermaid.”
The man inside the room seemed waiting for something. Finally he spoke in a voice full of annoyance. “I don’t need you, girlie. Trot along.”
For a fatal moment there was silence in the hall, and inside the room.
“Just to clean up your room, sir.”
There had been people outside the door, up there in Dorchester Avenue — milkman, laundryman — the door had been opened, and then the law had come. Chet Hemingway wasn’t taking a chance in the world.
He snarled, “Run along and peddle yourself some place else!”
Gently, Nick Glennan drew the frightened chambermaid around the corner, past the house detectives and the group of hard-faced officers from headquarters. “What he says is good advice, lady,” he murmured. “You’d better go.” There was a tense shuffling of feet on the thick rug.
Glennan looked coolly into the eyes of a brother detective. “It’s him?”
“Sure. His voice. I was a witness in K. C. when they had him up for trial. Know it anywhere.”
“Okay,” breathed Nick Glennan.
He said, “Hemingway. Are you going to come out, or do you want to be carried? Last fall we said that to some hoods, and they decided to stay. We carried them out and embalmed them. What do you say?”
In 1661, Chet Hemingway took out his two guns and turned toward the door. He fancied how it would look, in the headlines. “I say come and get me, if you’re man enough!” He put a heavy slug through the door.
“I am,” responded Nick, “and here... I... come.”
A machine gun was lifted, but Nick’s gesture stayed the ready finger. “No,” he muttered, “I missed him — twice. This time it’s me or him.”
He took care of the lock with his first three bullets, and heavy pebbles of lead gouged whole strips out of the veneer as he kicked against the wrecked door... Inside, there was the distant slam of the bathroom door, so Glennan braced his whole body against the big slice of wood which blocked his way. He crashed to the floor, the sundered hinges flying wide. The bathroom door opened a crack, and in that crack was a jet of dancing flame... turned out the lights... well, one of them, there in the dark.
Flat on the floor, with the air splitting beside his ears, he took steady aim at a point above the flashes, and scattered his three remaining bullets there. There was sudden silence — a cough, and then the sound of a body falling into a bathtub.
They switched on the lights, and sniffed in the doorway.
“He got Glennan.”
Bourse groaned from the hall, “Oh, the black-hearted—”
“The hell he got Glennan,” said Nick. He climbed to his feet and pushed the bathroom door wide. For one in Hemingway’s messy condition, the bathtub was a very good place for him to be sprawled.
Inspector Bourse looked at the corpse.
“You must have second sight,” he muttered.
“No indeed, sir. It was the shells.”
He found them in his vest pocket, and juggled them in his hands.
“Pistachio nuts,” somebody said.
Nick Glennan nodded, soberly. After all, Hemingway had been a man and now he wasn’t anything. Rest his soul, if possible... “The nut shells was all over the sun parlor, up on Dorchester Avenue,” he said. “They was also scattered on the sidewalk tonight where he waited for the inspector. He was a pig for them, it would seem. When the bellboy said that the man in Room 1661 of this hotel had sent twice for pistachio nuts during the day, it had to be Hemingway and no other. Probably he’s feeding on them this minute, wherever he’s gone.”
“I’ll answer that,” remarked his brother, grimly. “If Hemingway is eating pistachio nuts this minute, he’s eating roasted ones.”
Dorothy L. Sayers
The Man Who Knew How
The creator of Lord Peter Wimsey offers the chilling story of a man who lived in terror of a merciless filler — a killer who seemed to follow him as closely as his own shadow...
For perhaps the twentieth time since the train had left Carlisle, Pender glanced up from Murder at the Manse and caught the eye of the man opposite.
He frowned a little. It was irritating to be watched so closely, and always with that faint, sardonic smile. It was still more irritating to allow oneself to be so much disturbed by the smile and the scrutiny. Pender wrenched himself back to his book with a determination to concentrate upon the problem of the minister murdered in the library. But the story was of the academic kind that crowds all its exciting incidents into the first chapter, and proceeds thereafter by a long series of deductions to a scientific solution in the last. The thin thread of interest, spun precariously upon the wheel of Pender s reasoning brain, had been snapped. Twice he had to turn back to verify points that he had missed in reading. Then he became aware that his eyes had followed three closely argued pages without conveying anything whatever to his intelligence. He was not thinking about the murdered minister at all — he was becoming more and more actively conscious of the other man’s face. A queer face, Pender thought.
There was nothing especially remarkable about the features in themselves; it was their expression that daunted Pender. It was a secret face, the face of one who knew a great deal to other people’s disadvantage. The mouth was a little crooked and tightly tucked in at the corners, as though savouring a hidden amusement. The eyes, behind a pair of rimless pince-nez, glittered curiously; but that was possibly due to the light reflected in the glasses. Pender wondered what the man’s profession might be. He was dressed in a dark lounge suit, a raincoat and a shabby soft hat; his age was perhaps about forty.