"Avenger - 4408 Shadow - To Find A Dead Man" - читать интересную книгу автора (Avenger)

TO FIND A DEAD MAN
by Emile C. Tepperman


A reliable witness saw Dick Benson force the disbarred lawyer through the window
. . . and his only alibi was a man who had been dead two years!



DICK BENSON turned into Chatham Street from Summer, and a woman in a window somewhere above him
screamed, "Look out!"

Reacting instinctively to that high-pitched shriek of warning, Benson threw himself forward and
to the right, landing up against the building wall, just as something struck the pavement with a
ghastly, sickening plop.

Benson was on his feet instantly. A single glance was enough to tell him what it was that had
come hurtling down from above. It was not a pretty thing to see the crushed body of the man Iying in
ghastly stillness upon the sidewalk. Benson wiped a bit of blood from his spattered cheek. His face
was grim and hard as he leaped out to the curb and turned his gaze upward.

The woman who had Screamed the warning to him was lying limp across the windowsill of a second-
story room in a dead faint. Above her, the cheap hotel rose for five more stories. The windows in
the entire line from which the man's body might have come were dark. There was no way of telling
from which one he had fallen. It might even have been the roof.

A buzzing crowd of shocked spectators had already gathered around the grisly body, and a
patrolman was pushing through. For the moment, Benson was forgotten. He edged away from the fringe
of the crowd, and made for the entrance of the hotel.

Several people had come running out of the lobby, white-faced and trembling. One of them stopped
Benson, "Who was it?"

Benson shrugged. "If he has no papers on him, it'll be hard to tell!" he disengaged himself from
the man's shaky grip, and pushed through the fly-specked door into the hotel lobby. His eyes were
bleak, his lips tight. If his hunch was right, he knew very well who that dead man was. But he
didn't intend to impart that knowledge to anyone--just yet.

Within the lobby, the desk was deserted. The clerk must have been one of those who had run out.
Benson turned grimly toward the elevators. One cage was down, but there was no operator. He, too,
must have hurried out into the street. Benson shrugged, and started to enter the cage.

But just then, he heard the swift patter of feet on the stairs, and a girl appeared, stumbling
down, clutching at the railing with one hand and holding together a flimsy negligee with the other.
There was blood on her face coming from a cut on the side of her head. Her short, dark hair was
clotted with it, and there was more upon the front of the negligee. Her eyes were wild and glassy,
and her lower lip was trembling.

She stumbled on the last step, and settled in a frightened heap on the floor. She let her head
drop on one arm. "Murder!" she gasped. "He murdered my father! He pushed him out the window. Then he