"deathhastwohands" - читать интересную книгу автора (Blackmon Robert C)

no stamp. The letter read:


Dear Miss Trent:

Your brother, Frank, didn't knock off that guy, and he didn't get
the fifty thousand dollars that's missing. I know how it happened. I
heard the guys that did it talking in a beer parlor. They would kill
me if they knew I wrote this. You get the cops and bring them here,
and I'll tell everything if the cops promise to see I won't get killed.
I am doing this because I can't let a guy burn for something he didn't
do.

Yours truly,
Charlie Ricker,
Room 231, Eagle Hotel.


"A little boy brought that about thirty minutes before you came." Wilma Trent talked
rapidly, breathlessly. "He got away before I could read it. My first thought was to go to the
Eagle Hotel. I was about to leave when someone tried the apartment door without knocking. The
door was locked, so he didn't get in. After what the letter said, I was scared. I called the
police. Whoever it was in the hall stopped trying the door. That's why I had the gun when you
came. I was afraid you might be one of the men Charlie Ricker said would kill him and that you
were after me. Frank gave me the gun years ago. I would use it on anyone, on you, if that would
keep Frank from--tonight." Her voice broke. She started to her feet. "We've got to hurry to--"

"Wait!"

Moran thrust the letter into the side pocket of his coat, got to his feet and strode toward
the telephone, which was on a small table near the apartment door.

"I'll have the police block off the Eagle Hotel," he called over his shoulder as he reached
for the telephone. "That way, nothing can happen to Charlie Ricker before we--"

He stopped talking abruptly, the receiver at his ear. Thick brown brows met over his sudden-
ly narrowed eyes. There was no sound at all in the telephone receiver. The phone was dead.


Hard lights started burning deep in Moran's eyes. His mouth set grimly. His mind was churning.

Frank Trent, Wilma's brother, had been one of two clerks in Donald Rayburn's brokerage of-
fice. Rayburn had returned to the office one afternoon about four months ago and had found one
clerk dead with a crushed skull, Frank Trent gone and fifty thousand dollars in negotiable
securities missing. He called the cops.

Frank Trent was picked up an hour later near the Central Railroad Terminal. He said Rayburn
had telephoned him to go to an address near the terminal, but Rayburn had been lunching with
two customers and couldn't have telephoned. Trent claimed to know nothing about the missing
securities and they had never been found. He protested his innocence all through the trial. The