Lawyers -- Fiction; Love stories; Mystery and detective stories; Political corruption -- Fiction
My next visitor was a cabman. On the night in question he had taken a
small and a very nervous old woman to the Omega ferry. She appeared
excited and almost forgot to pay him. She carried a small satchel, and
wore a black veil. What did she look like? She had gray hair, and she
seemed to have a scar on her face that drew the corner of her mouth.
At ten o'clock I telephoned Burton: "For Heaven's sake," I said, "if
anybody has lost a little old lady in a black dress, wearing a black
veil, carrying a satchel, and with a scar diagonally across her cheek
from her eye to her mouth, I can tell them all about her, and where she
is now."
"That's funny," he said. "We're stirring up the pool and bringing up
things we didn't expect. The police have been looking for that woman
quietly for a week: she's the widow of a coal baron, and her
son-in-law's under suspicion of making away with her."
"Well, he didn't," I affirmed. "She committed suicide from an Omega
ferry boat and she's at the morgue this morning."
"Bully," he returned. "Keep on; you'll get lots of clues, and remember
one will be right."
It was not until noon, however, that anything concrete developed. In the
two hours between, I had interviewed seven more people. I had followed
the depressing last hours of the coal baron's widow, and jumped with
her, mentally, into the black river that night. I had learned of a small
fairish-haired girl who had tried to buy cyanide of potassium at three
drug-stores on the same street, and of a tall light woman who had taken
a room for three days at a hotel and was apparently demented.
At twelve, however, my reward came. Two men walked in, almost at the
same time: one was a motorman, in his official clothes, brass buttons
and patches around the pockets. The other was a taxicab driver. Both
had the uncertain gait of men who by occupation are unused to anything
stationary under them, and each eyed the other suspiciously.
The motorman claimed priority by a nose, so I took him first into my
private office. His story, shorn of his own opinions at the time and
later, was as follows:
On the night in question, Thursday of the week before, he took his car
out of the barn for the eleven o'clock run. Barney was his conductor.
They went from the barn, at Hays Street, down-town, and then started out
for Wynton. The controller blew out, and two or three things went wrong:
all told they lost forty minutes. They got to Wynton at five minutes
after two; their time there was one-twenty-five.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account