I buttoned up my collar, put on my vest, fixed the rope that I call a tie, and slipped into my coat. I opened the bureau-drawer and felt blindly for my gun. Then I had to open the drawer wider and look, because I couldn’t find it. I didn’t always carry it around with me, being a captain, since it pulled my suit out of shape.
I disarranged all the shirts my sister had neatly piled up in the drawer, and still I couldn’t find it. “What’d you do with my gun?” I called in to her. “I can’t find it.”
“It’s wherever you put it last,” she answered. “Don’t ask me where that is. You ought to know by now I wouldn’t put a hand on it for love nor money.”
That was true, for she was afraid of guns. She used to even ask me to pick it up and move it, when she wanted to clean out the drawer.
“Did you take it with you this morning?” she asked. “Maybe you left it down at the precinct-house.”
“No,” I said short-temperedly, “what do you think I do, go around cannoned-up like an armored-truckman? I simply wanted to turn it over to one of the guys in the lab, have it cleaned and oiled. It’s getting a little rusty.”
“Well, I’m sure I don’t know what I’d want with it. Or Jenny either, for that matter. And we’re the only other two people living in the house with you.”
“There you go,” I said. Her bringing Jenny into it was pure whimsy, as far as I was concerned. “I didn’t say anything about yon wanting it. Can’t a man ask a question in his own house? I can’t find it, that’s all.”
I was getting sick of this.
“Well, look in the right place and you will!” And that was all the help I could get out of her.
The front door opened and the kid came in just then. I was in the hall closet by that time, and by the time I could shift around to look, she’d gone by me.
I heard my sister say, “I kept your supper warm, dear. What are you walking like that for?”
“Oh, my heel came off just now, crossing the trolley tracks. I’ll have to go around to the shoemaker right after supper.”
“Tsk tsk, you could have been run over.”
I came back into the room and put on my hat. “Well, I’ll have to go without it,” I said. “Look for it for me, will you, Maggie? I want to turn it over to Kelcey.”
But she didn’t have any time for me now that the kid was back. She was too busy putting food on the table.
The kid was in my room, but that was understandable, since the mirror in there was the handiest and you know how kids are with mirrors. I happened to glance past the door and she was gazing at herself in it as though for the first time.
She must have heard me for she whirled and said: “I thought you’d gone already! I didn’t see you! Where were you?”
“Why, you brushed right by me,” I said, laughing. “Where are your eyes?”
She came toward me and first I thought she was going to fall, but I guess it was her shoe. I said, “Got a kiss for your old man?” There was no answer.
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
She shook her head quickly.
“Nothing,” she said.
My sister called her just then to come in and sit down, and she left me like she couldn’t get away fast enough. Just hungry, I guess.
The bureau-drawer was still open so, just for luck, I went over and took another look. And there was the gun, between two of my shirts.
I scratched my head and said to myself, “Well, I’m a great one!” You wouldn’t think you could miss anything that size and weight, in such a small drawer.
I hadn’t quite finished slinging it away as I came though the doorway, and they both got a glimpse of it. The kid must have been hungry and tired all right for her face was white and drawn.
My sister couldn’t let a chance like that go by. “Oh,” she said, nodding severely, “so you did find it! What did I tell you?” She continued to prattle on about my carelessness.
In the middle of it, without either of one of us seeing her go, the kid suddenly wasn’t there at the table any more. But we heard the bedroom door close and then there was a sound of something heavy dropping on the bed.
I just looked blank. I hadn’t been yelling or anything. In fact, I hadn’t said a word. But my sister took it out on me anyway. “Oh, anyone but a man would understand,” she said, and looked wise. What about, I don’t know. She picked up the kid’s dinner-plate and carried it toward the room, calling, “Jenny dear, finish your supper for Aunt Margaret.” Then to me over her shoulder: “Go on to your job!”
Riding down to the precinct-house on the bus, I said to myself: “I’m going to see she eases up a little on her schoolwork, she’s been working too hard at it. That damn trigger-whatever-it-is would make anyone nervous.”
The desk-sergeant put Holmes through to me at about ten that night. He said. “Cap, we’ve just turned up a homicide out here at Starrett Avenue. Number twenty-five. Guy shot dead in a bungalow. Want to come out and take a look?” The last was just rhetoric, of course.
“Yep,” I said briefly, and hung up.
I got in touch with Prints, Pix, and the examiner, told them where to go, and then I picked up Jordan and we rode out...
It was a cheap little house, the kind that are put up a whole dozen at a time. Each one about ten or twelve yards away from the next. It was the only one in the whole row that was lit up, except one way down at the corner. The whole community must have been out to the movies in a body.
We braked, got out, and went up on the porch. The light over it was lit, and Holmes had the door swung back out of the way, with just a screen-door veiling the lighted room. We went right into the room itself from the porch. The man was there, lying on his face, with an arm thrown up around his head, as though he had tried to ward off the shot.
My instinctive impression of the man, even before I’d even seen the face, was that he had been a no-good.
Holmes and the patrolman from the beat were both there with us. The cop was just waiting to be told what next to do, and Holmes was taking stabs at looking around — which I guessed he had only started after he heard us drive up. There’s really nothing to be done until after the experts have had their innings, but the average second-grader hasn’t the moral courage to sit there with his hands folded when his captain walks in on him. I was a second-grader once myself. And before that, a harness-cop.
“Who is he?” I asked.
The cop said, “Their name is Trinker. His wife is over at her sister’s in Mapledale, who’s been down with the flu or something.”
He had the details all right.
I said, “How do you know?”
“It’s my beat, sir,” he said. “She stopped on the sidewalk and told me about it when she was leaving Wednesday. I saw the door open and the room lit up, like it is now, when I first came on duty. Kind of cold for the door to be open these nights. But I went on past the first time, thinking he might have gone out for something and didn’t have a key. It was still that way the second time I made my rounds, so I went up the walk and called out to him, and then I stuck my head through the door, and there he was. I happened to run into Holmes down at the call-box—”
“You been relieved on your beat?”
“Yes sir, of course.”