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

"Fine," the doctor said with a grimace. "That's exactly what I figured when I went up there."

"But?" The sheriff left the question hanging in the air. He turned to look at Jason. The man was staring
avidly, greedily, at the corpse's chest. His eyes followed a trickle of blood that went from the wound
down toward the floor.

"Ordinarily," the doctor said, "there is a ladder there. Tonight there isn't."

The sheriff's stomach dropped. That made it awkward. "But... if the killer went up the ladder and then for
some reason of his own took it along with him..."
He said this watching Jason's face to see if there was any reaction. There was, but it was just the result of
the man's having seen a drop of blood fall to the floor.

"I thought of that, too," the doctor said, and his voice sounded aggrieved. "I'm not an idiot, you know."

The sheriff looked at the doctor who was putting his stethoscope into his little black bag. The sheriff
thought dully that the doctor would look naked without the bag. He realized he had never seen him
without it.

The doctor said, slowly looking off into space, "The ladder is out in back of the house near where you'd
have to climb to come down from the second story roof."

The sheriff realized that something was coming. Something he wasn't going to like. He didn't.

The doctor said, "The ladder has been painted today. It's still wet." He paused, and then said, "There are
no marks on the wet paint."

Suddenly, shockingly, a giggle tore through the silence of the room. The giggle got louder and louder.

CHAPTER II
THE sheriff stood in the center of the rumpus room. Downstairs one of his men was dragging Jason out
of the house. Jason was still giggling. The sheriff could hear the obscene sound even up here.

He looked about him. On the walls there were some pictures of young Archer, some pictures of some
pretty girls, and a machete. The machete reminded the sheriff that the young man had seen service in the
South Pacific.

Behind the home-made bar there were, thrown helter skelter on the floor, more souvenirs of the war. A
box about two and a half feet square decorated with what could only be Japanese art, rubbed against a
primitive devil mask.

Some spears, some arrows, an iron woodbow... that about ended up the inventory of the room. Above
him, as the sheriff looked up, was the trap door that led to the roof of the second floor of the house.

The ceiling was only about twelve feet from the floor. The sheriff, realizing that, went over to the bar. If
someone had stood on the bar, then... he looked at the bar. It was dusty. There were no marks to show
that feet had ever trod the surface of the bar.

The bar was four and a half feet high. A six foot man, like Jason, standing on it would be about two feet
from the ceiling. A two foot jump, or just extending his arms upward, would give the man a hand hold on