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

shamefaced at the sound of his words.

"How's that?"

The doctor explained about the windows and doors. The sheriff thought. He knew that all the houses on
this block were as alike as peas. Having been in one down the street a while ago he knew what the
layout of this one must be. Product of a fast-talking real estate agent, they were all a box set upon a box.
The small box was the top floor with three rooms. The ground floor had a hall... at one end of the hall
was a sun porch of some kind, next to that was the kitchen, and at an angle off that was the library. Or at
least in the real estate prospectus it was called a library. In that other house he had been in, the sheriff
remembered, the library had been turned into a nursery.

Aloud he asked what it was used for here.

"That other room? Thomas used it as a sort of office. He did a lot of work at home, you know," the
doctor said.

Staring off into space, the sheriff reconstructed what he remembered about the second floor. Three
rooms, two generally used as bedrooms. In this family, the sheriff knew there had been only three people.
Young Tom, Thomas Senior, and his wife.

"What about the third room upstairs?" The sheriff gestured with a thumb upward.

"Tommy made that over into a rumpus room. I just came down from there," the doctor said.

"All the windows were locked?"

The doctor nodded. Right then the door opened and a man about thirty stepped in the front door that led
right into the living room. They looked at him. The sheriff had expected it to be one of his men. It wasn't.
It was... who was it? The sheriff tried to remember. He knew something about this man... what was it?

The doctor said, "Jason! What are you doing here?"

Jimmy Jason shrugged his sharp narrow shoulders. He said nothing. His narrow face was cement still.
Eyes set too close together looked around the room curiously.

His face lit up when he saw the corpse.

Jason. The sheriff remembered something about a peeping tom charge against the man. He turned his
back on Jason. He had had a thought glimmering when the door had opened.

"That room on the top floor," the sheriff said, "isn't there a trap door in the ceiling so you can get to the
roof?"

The doctor, wrenching his eyes away from Jason, said, "Oh, yes. There's a trap door. It isn't locked,
either."

"Well, then, what's the puzzle?" the sheriff asked. "The killer raced upstairs, climbed the ladder that leads
to the trap in the roof and then went out and down!"