The police found that six shots had been fired at Willsson. The two that had missed him had hit a vacant house in front of which he head been shot. Tracing the course of the bullets from those two shot,s the police had learned that the shooting had been done from a narrow alley across the street. Outside of that nobody knew anything.
Editorially, the Morning Herald gave a brief summary of the head man's short career as a civic reformer and expressed its belief that he had been removed by some of the people who didn't want Personville cleaned up. The Herald said that the chief of police could best show his own innocence by speedily catching the murderer. The editorial was both blunt and bitter.
I finished it with my breakfast coffee, jumped a Broadway car, dropped off at Laurel Avenue, and turned don toward the dead man's house. I was half a block from it when something changed my mind.
A smallish young man in three shades of brown crossed the street ahead of me, showing a dark profile that was pretty—Max Thaler, alias Whisper. I reached the corner of Mountain Boulevard in time to catch the flash of his brown-covered rear leg vanishing into the lat Donald Willsson's vestibule.
I went back to Broadway, found a drug-store with a phone booth in it, searched the directory for Elihu Willsson's residence number, called it, told somebody who claimed to be Elihu's secretary that I had been brought from San Francisco by Donald Willsson, that I knew something about his death, and that I wanted to see his father. When I made it emphatic enough I got an invitation to present myself.
The czar of Poisonville was propped up in bed when his secretary—a noiseless, slim, sharp-eyed man of forty—brought me into the bedroom.
The old man's head was small and almost perfectly round under its thick crop of close-cut white hair. His ears were too small and plastered too close to his head to spoil the spherical effect. His nose also was small, carrying down the curve of his bony forehead. Mouth and chin were straight lines chopping the sphere off. Below them a short thick neck ran down into white pajamas between square, meaty shoulders. One of his arms was outside the covers—a short, compact arm that ended in a thick-fingered, blunt, pink hand. His eyes were round, blue, small, and watery, But they looked as if they were hiding behind the watery film and under the bushy white eyebrows only until the time came to jump out and grab something. He wasn't the sort of man whose pocket you'd try to pick unless you had a lot of confidence in your fingers.
He ordered me into a bed-side chair with a two-inch jerk of his round head, chased the secretary away with another, and said:
"What was is this about my son?" His voice was harsh. His chest had too much and his mouth not enough to do with his words for them o be very clear.
"I'm with the Continental Detective Agency's San Francisco branch," I told him. "We got a five hundred dollar check from your son and a letter asking that a man be sent over to do some work for him. I'm the man. I called him up when I got in yesterday afternoon. He told me to come to his house last night. I went there. He didn't show up. When I got downtown I learned he had been killed."
Elihu Willsson regarded me suspiciously and asked:
"Well, what of it?"
"While I was waiting your daughter-in-law got a phone message, went out, came back with what looked like blood on her shoe, and told me it was no use waiting, her husband wouldn't be home."
He sat straight up in bed and called Mrs. Willsson a flock of things. When he ran out of words of that sort he still had some breath left, so he used it to shout at me:
