I said I would. O’Marra and his companion drove on up Green Street. I walked half a block south to the Rutledge Block.
With a foot on the first of the rickety steps that led up to the lawyer’s floor, I stopped to look at something.
It was barely visible back in a dim corner of the first floor. It was a shoe. It was lying in a position that empty shoes don’t lie in.
I took my foot off the step and went toward the shoe. Now I could see an ankle and the cuff of a black pants-leg above the shoe-top.
That prepared me for what I found.
I found Mr. Charles Proctor Dawn huddled among two brooms, a mop and a bucket, in a little alcove formed by the back of the stairs and a corner of the wall. His Vandyke beard was red with blood from a cut that ran diagonally across his forehead. His head was twisted sidewise and backward at an angle that could only be managed with a broken neck.
I quoted Noonan’s, “What’s got to be done has got to be done,” to myself, and, gingerly pulling one side of the dead man’s coat out of the way, emptied his inside coat pocket, transferring a black book and a sheaf of papers to my own pocket. In two of his other pockets I found nothing I wanted. The rest of his pockets couldn’t be got at without moving him, and I didn’t care to do that.
Five minutes later I was back in the hotel, going in through a side door, to avoid Dick and Mickey in the lobby, and walking up to the mezzanine to take an elevator.
In my room I sat down and examined my loot.
I took tile book first, a small imitation-leather memoranda book of the sort that sells for not much money in any stationery store. It held some fragmentary notes that meant nothing to me, and thirty-some names and addresses that meant as little, with one exception:
Helen Albury
1229A Hurricane St.
That was interesting because, first, a young man named Robert Albury was in prison, having confessed that he shot and killed Donald Willsson in a fit of jealousy aroused by Willsson’s supposed success with Dinah Brand; and, second, Dinah Brand had lived, and had been murdered, at 1232 Hurricane Street, across the street from 1229A.
I did not find my name in the book.
I put the book aside and began unfolding and reading the papers I had taken with it. Here too I had to wade through a lot that didn’t mean anything to find something that did.
This find was a group of four letters held together by a rubber band.
The letters were in slitted envelopes that had postmarks dated a week apart, on the average. The latest was a little more than six mouths old. The letters were addressed to Dinah Brand. The first–that is, the earliest–wasn’t so bad, for a love letter. The second was a bit goofier. The third and fourth were swell examples of how silly an ardent and unsuccessful wooer can be, especially if lie’s getting on in years. The four letters were signed by Elihu Willsson.
I had not found anything to tell me definitely why Mr. Charles Proctor Dawn had thought he could blackmail me out of a thousand dollars, but I had found plenty to think about. I encouraged my brain with two Fatimas, and then went downstairs.
“Go out and see what you can raise on a lawyer named Charles Proctor Dawn,” I told Mickey. “He’s got offices in Green Street. Stay away from them. Don’t put in a lot of time on him. I just want a rough line quick.”
I told Dick to give me a five-minute start and then follow me out to the neighborhood of 1229A Hurricane Street.
1229A was the upper flat in a two-story building almost directly opposite Dinah’s house. 1229 was divided into two flats, with a private entrance for each. I rang the bell at the one I wanted.
The door was opened by a thin girl of eighteen or nineteen with dark eyes set close together in a shiny yellowish face under short-cut brown hair that looked damp.