She began: “I’m afraid I’ll ha–” and stopped to look at the maid in the doorway.
The maid said Mrs. Willsson was wanted at the phone. She excused herself and followed the maid out. She didn’t go downstairs, but spoke over an extension within earshot.
I heard: “Mrs. Willsson speaking….Yes…. I beg your pardon?… Who?… Can’t you speak a little louder?… What?… Yes…. Yes…. Who is this?… Hello! Hello!”
The telephone hook rattled. Her steps sounded down the hallway– rapid steps.
I set fire to a cigarette and stared at it until I heard her going down the steps. Then I went to a window, lifted an edge of the blind, and looked out at Laurel Avenue, and at the square white garage that stood in the rear of the house on that side.
Presently a slender woman in dark coat and hat came into sight hurrying from house to garage. It was Mrs. Willsson. She drove away in a Buick coupé. I went back to my chair and waited.
Three-quarters of an hour went by. At five minutes after eleven, automobile brakes screeched outside. Two minutes later Mrs. Willsson came into the room. She had taken off hat and coat. Her face was white, her eyes almost black.
“I’m awfully sorry,” she said, her tight-lipped mouth moving jerkily, “but you’ve had all this waiting for nothing. My husband won’t be home tonight.”
I said I would get in touch with him at the Herald in the morning.
I went away wondering why the green toe of her left slipper was dark and damp with something that could have been blood.
I walked over to Broadway and caught a street car. Three blocks north of my hotel I got off to see what the crowd was doing around a side entrance of the City Hall.
Thirty or forty men and a sprinkling of women stood on the sidewalk looking at a door marked Police Department. There were men from mines and smelters still in their working clothes, gaudy boys from pool rooms and dance halls, sleek men with slick pale faces, men with the dull look of respectable husbands, a few just as respectable and dull women, and some ladies of the night.
On the edge of this congregation I stopped beside a square-set man in rumpled gray clothes. His face was grayish too, even the thick lips, though he wasn’t much older than thirty. His face was broad, thick-featured and intelligent. For color he depended on a red windsor tie that blossomed over his gray flannel shirt.
“What’s the rumpus?” I asked him.
He looked at me carefully before he replied, as if he wanted to be sure that the information was going into safe hands. His eyes were gray as his clothes, but not so soft.
“Don Willsson’s gone to sit on the right hand of God, if God don’t mind looking at bullet holes.”
“Who shot him?” I asked.
The gray man scratched the back of his neck and said:
“Somebody with a gun.”
I wanted information, not wit. I would have tried my luck with some other member of the crowd if the red tie hadn’t interested me. I said:
“I’m a stranger in town. Hang the Punch and Judy on me. That’s what strangers are for.”
“Donald Willsson, Esquire, publisher of the Morning and Evening Heralds, was found in Hurricane Street a little while ago, shot very dead by parties unknown,” he recited in a rapid singsong. “Does that keep your feelings from being hurt?”
“Thanks.” I put out a finger and touched a loose end of his tie. “Mean anything? Or just wearing it?”
“I’m Bill Quint.”
“The hell you are!” I exclaimed, trying to place the name. “By God, I’m glad to meet you!”
I dug out my card case and ran through the collection of credentials I had picked up here and there by one means or another. The red card was the one I wanted. It identified me as Henry F. Neill, A. B. seaman, member in good standing of the Industrial Workers of the World. There wasn’t a word of truth in it.
I passed this card to Bill Quint. He read it carefully, front and back, returned it to my hand, and looked me over from hat to shoes, not trustfully.