"Maxwell Grant - The Shadow - 319 - Murder on Main Street" - читать интересную книгу автора (Grant Maxwell)

"You go ahead and call the sheriff and then go over to the Randall's. I'll check while I wait for the sheriff."
He heard the front door close behind her. He looked again at the dead man. The knife had gone straight
through the heart. There was nothing else to do here till the sheriff arrived.

He walked toward the flight of stairs that led to the bedrooms. The windows were closed tight and
bolted. Then moving more quickly, he went to the last room on the second floor. It was, he knew, a sort
of rumpus room. The house had no cellar, nor an attic. He opened the door and looked into the room.

Odd chairs, a home-made bar that the junior Thomas Archer had sawed and nailed together. The
windows in this room were bolted tight, too, he could see...

Mrs. Archer phoned her tragic call to the sheriff's office. That done, she walked, head held high, eyes
tearless, jaws set, to the home of the girl that her son was to have married.

The Randalls, mother and father, looked at her in surprise. Pudgy, gentle man, and thin as a lathe woman,
they made an odd pair. They had their hands occupied. Mrs. Randall was in the midst of knitting one of
her famous cardigans. Mr. Randall's hands, up in the air, had the wool wrapped around them.

Mrs. Randall said, "Mary! Mary Archer! What gets you out of bed at this hour?"

Swiftly, in terse sentences, Mrs. Archer told her story. The Randalls looked their sympathy. Moving as a
pair from the door which Mrs. Randall had opened with a hand full of wool, they brought Mrs. Archer
into their living room.

"I can't... there just aren't words..." Mr. Randall said, gulping:

"First Tommy and now his father... oh Mary... I can't stand it!" Mrs. Randall's thin face contorted and
tears rolled down her dried out cheeks. She went to Mrs. Archer, dropping her knitting wool. Her arms
flew to comfort the bereaved woman. "Come along, my dear." She led Mrs. Archer out of the room. Mr.
Randall, sitting stock still in stunned amazement from which he had not yet recovered, spoke to himself.
"It just don't seem possible." He brooded alone. In the other room, he knew his wife would give what
comfort there was to the widow.

In the deadly stillness of the night he heard brakes squeak. He pondered on that for a while, and realized
then that this was murder... that the sheriff would be on the job.

The sheriff stepped into the Archer home. He was not at all what the words call to mind, but was instead
a sturdy young veteran who had studied to be a policeman in a nearby big city until a game leg resulting
from a piece of shrapnel put an end to those plans. He saw at first glance the corpse, and then at a
second look, the pudgy doctor whom everyone in town called the old doc. Although, the sheriff thought,
the doctor wasn't particularly old, just in his early forties... it was his air. He had a stodgy old man's
attitude to the world. That must be what accounted for his nickname. Aloud, the sheriff said, "Hi, doc."

"Billy. Glad you could make it. This is a bad one, son."

The knife in Mr. Archer's heart precluded asking any questions about the cause of death. Instead the
young sheriff said, "Who did it?"

"Billy Tennan, as sure as my name is Doc Ender, I swear it must have been a ghost!" The doctor looked