5 Detective Novels Magazine Cover — page 13: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

THE KILLER FROM BUFFALO after work?” immediately following questions about her hours. “What’s your name?” “Janet,” she said without enthusiasm. “Work night before last, Janet?” “The night of the stickup?” The wariness was replaced by interest. “T’ll say I did! I was as close to the bandit as I am to you.” “You were one of the witnesses, eh?” “Sure. Me and Gert—she’s the girl just went back in the kitchen—and Henry, the cook, all had to go over to Werlinger’s Funeral Home to identify the bandit’s body. They use Werlinger’s for a morgue, you know, on account of we got no regular morgue.” Tony asked, “Just the three of you and Mr. Larson were here when it hap- pened ?” “Yeah,” she said eagerly, gratified by his attentiveness. “It was just before closing and there hadn’t been a customer for fifteen minutes, when in walked this fellow with a handkerchief over his face—” “Handkerchief!” Tony snapped. “Chief Murphy didn’t say anything about a handkerchief.” Some of her previous wariness re- turned. “Say, are you a reporter or something?” “Cop,” said Tony. geant Ransome.” She eyed him suspiciously. “Then you must be new. I know all the cops.” “I’m from Buffalo.” He slipped a badge from his vest pocket and held it before her face a moment before re- turning it. “Down to take back the body. I have no official connection with the case. Just interested.” “Oh,” she said, obviously impressed by meeting a big-city detective from so far away. “About the handkerchief,” Tony prodded. “How’d you identify the bandit if his face was covered ?” “Why, he might as well left it off,” she scoffed. “He’d been in here for supper, you see, and I recognized him right away in spite of the mask. He had this white scar through one eyebrow, and his nose had a bump on it, where it had been broken sometime, I guess. The hand- kerchief didn’t hide that. Then too, I could tell the clothes. He had on a green “Detective Ser- 13 corduroy jacket with leather elbow guards and leather patch pockets, blue denim pants and a pork-pie hat with a little hole worn where it pinched to- gether in front. I noticed his clothes at supper because they was old and kind of worn like a hobo’s but clean as a pin and even pressed.” SLOW sickness built within the little man. This was no primed wit- ness. She was telling the truth spon- taneously, and her testimony left no doubt that the killer had been Sam. “How'd the shooting happen?” he asked dully. “That was the terriblest thing of all. No call for it whatever. With his gun the bandit motioned me and Gert and Mr. Larson behide the counter, then pushed open the kitchen door, still keep- ing his gun on us, and made Henry come out too. We all crowded over there near the coffee urn while he cleaned out the register. Then he backed to the door, and we all thought he was just going to leave. Nobody made a move or said a thing, but all of a sudden he aimed the gun at Mr. Larson and fired. The boss fell dead just like that.” She snapped her fingers. “Then the robber ran out the door.” As one of the table customers ap- proached the counter with his check, Janet moved over to the register. Moodily the little man watched the waitress, Gert, bring a tray of food from the kitchen and return again with a load of dirty dishes. He drained his coffee cup and pushed it away. The bandit seemed to have been Sam all right, he decided, but he could not have been in his right mind. The wild possibility that Sam had been hyp- notized by some master criminal jumped into his mind, to be irritably kicked out as plausible only in comic books. Could Sam somehow have been roped into what he thought was a practical joke? The idea seemed as far-fetched as the first, except the only possible circum- stance under which Tony could visualize the good-natured Sam firing a gun at another human, was if he believed it loaded with blanks. He turned his mind back to Chief MICLOO® (CO) S (C(O)