Keeping one hand on the open knife in my pocket, I ran toward the little brown man, running on the heads and shoulders of the people in the plaza. The heads and shoulders were of unequal heights and not evenly spaced. I slipped and floundered over them.
The little brown man stood on the steps and laughed until I had almost reached him. Then he ran into the tall building. I chased him up miles of spiral stairway, always just an inch more than a hand’s reach behind him. We came to the roof. He ran straight across to the edge and jumped just as one of my hands touched him.
His shoulder slid out of my fingers. My hand knocked his sombrero off, and closed on his head. It was a smooth hard round head no larger than a large egg. My fingers went all the way around it. Squeezing his head in one hand, I tried to bring the knife out of my pocket with the other–and realized that I had gone off the edge of the roof with him. We dropped giddily down toward the millions of upturned faces in the plaza, miles down.
I opened my eyes in the dull light of morning sun filtered through drawn blinds.
I was lying face down on the dining room floor, my head resting on my left forearm. My right arm was stretched straight out. My right hand held the round blue and white handle of Dinah Brand’s ice pick. The pick’s six-inch needle-sharp blade was buried in Dinah Brand’s left breast.
She was lying on her back, dead. Her long muscular legs were stretched out toward the kitchen door. There was a run down the front of her right stocking.
Slowly, gently, as if afraid of awakening her, I let go the ice pick, drew in my arm, and got up.
My eyes burned. My throat and mouth were hot, wooly. I went into the kitchen, found a bottle of gin, tilted it to my mouth, and kept it there until I had to breathe. The kitchen clock said seven-forty-one.
With the gin in me I returned to the dining room, switched on the lights, and looked at the dead girl.
Not much blood was in sight: a spot the size of a silver dollar around the hole the ice pick made in her blue silk dress. There was a bruise on her right cheek, just under the cheek bone. Another bruise, finger-made, was on her right wrist. Her hands were empty. I moved her enough to see that nothing was under her.
I examined the room. So far as I could tell, nothing had been changed in it. I went back to the kitchen and found no recognizable changes there.
The spring lock on the back door was fastened, and had no marks to show it had been monkeyed with. I went to the front door and failed to find any marks on it. I went through the house from top to bottom, and learned nothing. The windows were all right. Tile girl’s jewelry, on her dressing table (except the two diamond rings on her hands), and four hundred odd dollars in her handbag, on a bedroom chair, were undisturbed.
In the dining room again, I knelt beside the dead girl and used my handkerchief to wipe the ice pick handle clean of any prints my fingers had left on it. I did the same to glasses, bottles, doors, light buttons, and the pieces of furniture I had touched, or was likely to have touched.
Then I washed my hands, examined my clothes for blood, made sure I was leaving none of my property behind, and went to the front door. I opened it, wiped the inner knob, closed it behind me, wiped the outer knob, and went away.
From a drug store in upper Broadway I telephoned Dick Foley and asked him to come over to my hotel. He arrived a few minutes after I got there.
“Dinah Brand was killed in her house last night or early this morning,” I told him. “Stabbed with an ice pick. The police don’t know it yet. I’ve told you enough about her for you to know that there are any number of people who might have had reason for killing her. There are three I want looked up first–Whisper, Dan Rolff and Bill Quint, the radical fellow. You’ve got their descriptions. Rolff is in the hospital with a dented skull. I don’t know which hospital. Try the City first. Get hold of Mickey Linehan–he’s still camped on Pete the Finn’s trail–and have him let Pete rest while he gives you a hand on this. Find out where those three birds were last night. And time means something.”