Afterward it was easy to know what he should have done. He should have quit while he was ahead. He should have kept right on in pursuit of that feather bed and paid no attention to the excited people who were spilling out of a dozen doorways to gather around a terrible something in the street. Above all, he should have avoided Viggo, the little bellhop with the large vocabulary, who was suddenly running toward him with his tongue racing on ahead.
“Did you see it, Herre Willis?” the boy shouted. “A man is crossing the street. An auto comes speeding. Wham! The man is dead! Hit and run, just like in America!”
It was too late for all of the things Larry should have done. All he could do now was stand at the curbing like a tailor’s dummy and stare at an object in the gutter not three feet away. Stare and listen while Viggo babbled on.
“I saw everything, Herre Willis. I saw the man start across the street. I saw the black sedan swing around the corner—”
“The black sedan,” Larry echoed.
Of course it was a black sedan. Larry knew that without asking, but he had to say something to keep from shouting the rest of what he knew.
“The black sedan,” Viggo insisted. “I saw the whole thing because I’d just stepped outside to post this letter…. Oh, you’ve dropped yours, Herre Willis.”
The boy wasn’t making any sense. All Larry was trying to do was rake up his room key out of his coat pocket and get upstairs before the newly arrived policeman at this street scene got a look at his face and started asking questions. What did he know anyway? What did he really know? And what business of his was this grief in the street even if he did? H.J. wasn’t footing the bills to this convention so his special representative could get involved in somebody else’s funeral!
But now it seemed that something had dropped to the sidewalk, and Viggo was picking it up.
“Your letter, Herre Willis. It just now fell out of your pocket with the map. Do you want it posted? … Oh, it hasn’t been addressed.”
No sense at all. Just a babbling boy who’d seen a man killed and lost his wits. But he did thrust something into Larry’s hands before racing back to that crowd in the street, and the something was a folded map with an envelope protruding from the folds. A long, unsealed envelope that Larry had never seen before.
Turn it over and over. Lift up the flap and look inside. Try to make sense of it, just any kind of sense at all…. One … two … three. Three crisp one-hundred-dollar bills in United States currency, and in the gutter, not three feet away, a dead man’s cap. Navy blue with a little gold anchor in braid just above the leather visor.
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Copyright © 1956 by Helen Nielsen, Registration Renewed 1984
All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction.
Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events, or locales in this novel are either the product of the author’s imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. The resemblance of any character to actual persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.
eISBN 10: 1-4405-4131-0
eISBN 13: 978-1-4405-4131-5
Crime is Murder Page 20
