"Kenneth Robeson - Doc Savage 115 - The Fiery Menace" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robeson Kenneth)

His feet and one hand were sticking out of the thing. The chandelier was one of a battery of the elaborate
affairs which supplied subdued light and decorative effect to the lobby of the building, which was the
largest lobby in the largest building in the midtown section of the city. The building was eighty-six floors
tall, with twenty-two elevators serving the tenants. Better than five thousand people worked in the
building, and many more than that number passed in and out of the lobby daily. Although the hour was
early, it was somewhat unusual that no one had happened to look up and see the two feet and the hand
sticking out of the chandelier bowl. Particularly since blood from the hand had flowed down and stained
the side of the bowl.

Someone called the building superintendent. The superintendent in a building of that size is a personage.
He gets a salary of ten thousand dollars a year and has a mahogany desk to sit behind. This
superintendent punched buttons, issued orders, and an extension ladder and a squad of agile janitors
appeared on the scene.

A janitor climbed the ladder, examined the hand that was sticking out of the chandelier, felt of it. He
climbed a step higher, looked into the bowl, did some poking around inside, then climbed down, looking
as if it were a question of whether or not he would keep his breakfast.

“Dead,” he reported.

“From what?”

“From a little hole in his head.”

Everyone took it for granted that the man meant a bullet hole, which was an error that was not
discovered immediately. There was an increase in the excitement, although now there was nothing to be
excited about. The man was dead, so that whatever had happened had already happened.

But the crowd gathered and the excitement spread because part of a dead man was sticking out of the
chandelier in the lobby of one of the half dozen largest buildings in the world. And a body in a chandelier
was unusual, to say the least. Too, there was bad management in keeping the crowd back, first on the
part of the superintendent and his janitors, and then on the part of the policemen who came sirening up to
take charge. There was an error of judgment on the part of one of the cops, for he became enthusiastic
and abusive and gave a citizen a shove. The citizen, being a free-born, profanity-speaking American,
applied his fist to the cop's nose, flattening that organ somewhat. This did not add to peace and
tranquillity.

Due to this boisterous foolishness, plus the failure of the janitor to elaborate on what he meant by a hole
in the head, further truth about the man in the chandelier was delayed some thirty minutes.



NEXT data on the man in the chandelier came from a lady. “Lady” was what the newspapers called her.
Some of the papers referred to her as “an old lady.” It was true-but it was not at all important in the
chandelier matter, because it had no bearing that the persons who saw the old lady's picture and
remembered her ten years back referred to her, most of them, in descriptive terms not ordinarily used in
drawing-room conversation. However, the old girl was too shopworn for further mischief and was
spending her days of decline as a scrubwoman in the skyscraper.
From the Morning Eagle: