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Roy Glashan's Library
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The Spider, April 1941, with "The Doves of Death"
Doc Turner knew that sometimes pigeons carry messages of doom, as well as words of salvation. But he had never heard of murder-by-carrier-pigeon—until the night Fate promised to end his brave career as Champion of the Poor!
ANDREW TURNER was increasingly certain that the gaunt young
man's interest in safety razors was an excuse for a more obscure
purpose. He asked his questions vaguely, and listened not so much
to the white-haired pharmacist's replies as to sounds that
invaded the ancient drugstore from Morris Street: pushcart
peddlers' raucous cries, a jabber of alien tongues, the shuffle
of many feet on cracked sidewalks.
An odd tenseness possessed the stranger's slender, gray-suited frame, and his lean countenance.
"Five dollars," he remarked, picking up the highest-priced razor, "must be almost a half-month's rent for a flat around here. You can't sell many of these."
"I didn't even stock them until recently," Doc Turner said. He tugged at his white, bushy mustache. "But now that defense work has driven the nearby factories to three shifts a day, there's more money being spent."
His customer flicked open the razor's head. Doc noted fingers that were long and strong, and exceedingly deft. "I suppose the new jobs have brought a lot of new people into the neighborhood?"
"No." The druggist's faded blue eyes went blank. "I haven't noticed any." His huge nose flared. "The plants have no trouble recruiting all the labor they need from among the people who've always lived here. They're only working on sub-contracts from the big companies, you see. They're not so terrifically important."
"Not important?" A thin and utterly humorless smile touched the other's straight mouth. "Aren't you mistaken? Seems to me that failure of this small stuff to come through on schedule might cause a bottleneck and upset the whole schedule." Replacing the razor in its box, he murmured, "You would be likely to know of any strangers coming to live in the vicinity, I take it."
"I rather think I would, Mr.—" Doc's eyebrows raised.
"Bailey," the other sighed. "Fred Bailey."
"I opened this store here more years ago than I care to recall." A hand whose skin was netted with veins gestured to the heavy-framed showcases, the sagging shelves of the ancient pharmacy. "The people of Morris Street are my family. I certainly should be aware of any newcomer among them."
"And there has been none?" Bailey persisted.
"Well," Doc pondered, "there is Charles Mount."
"Mount?" the gaunt young man repeated, and seemed to be testing his memory. "Charles Mount? What does he do for a living?"
"Nothing." Turner's drooped lids veiled a mischievous twinkle. "He showed up last April, rented a furnished room from Mrs. Papalos on the top floor of a tenement around the corner on Hogbund Lane. He has stayed in it ever since. He never has any visitors. He goes out once a week to buy scraps of food for himself and a flour-sack full of stale bread for his pigeons."
Behind the mask of Bailey's face there was sudden taut attention. "He keeps pigeons?"
"No." Doc was hard put to it to restrain a chuckle. "It's the pigeons from the park that he feeds. You can see them precisely at four every afternoon, a great cloud of them swarming in through Mount's window." If Bailey could make something of that, he was good. "Over on Garden Avenue there would have been complaints to the police long ago. Down here we just smile, call him Pigeon Charley and let it go at that."
If Turner expected the young man to betray annoyance he was fooled. "Certainly an odd character," Bailey murmured, and then nodded at the razor he'd been examining. "I'll take that one," he said.
Doc rang up the sale and watched his customer vanish into Morris Street's shifting throng. "You're a suspicious old codger, Andrew Turner," he chided himself. "Still..."
MEN looking for factory jobs do not blithely buy five dollar
razors, nor display well-filled wallets while paying for them.
"Whatever he was after," the old druggist said the following
evening, "he didn't get it out of me."
"I suspect you've got a hunch he was up to no good, Doc." Jack Ransom grinned affectionately. The carrot-headed, barrel-chested young garage mechanic had dropped in, as was his daily habit, for a chat with his aged friend. "You've got a funny way of smelling trouble before it happens."
The tie that bound this oddly-assorted couple had sprung from dangers shared. Doc Turner was more than merely a druggist to the slum-dwellers of Morris Street. He guided them in the strange ways of the strange land to which they'd come from their birthplace across the seas. When they were threatened by those criminals who prey on the friendless poor, Doc fought for them with his keen brain and a courage that his age-enfeebled body seem to belie. It was Jack's powerful frame and hard fists which, when violence entered the picture, usually settled the issue.
In the course of these adventures, Turner had developed a sixth sense for any insidious threat to the poverty-stricken aliens he called his "family." It was this to which Ransom referred. "As far's I know though," he continued, "everything seems peaceful."
"Too peaceful." Doc's brow was wrinkled. "With the new prosperity that's come to Morris Street—"
"The dumb brutes are ripe for plucking. Yeah. But, hello—" Jack broke off. "If this ain't a dick coming in I'm a three-tailed whooflefinch."
The burly individual plodded wearily to the showcase by which the two friends stood talking, derby hat canted sidewise. He dipped into a vest-pocket as he reached them, briefly displayed a gold badge. "Detective Fallon," he said heavily. "Homicide Squad."
Doc shot a brief glance at Jack and asked, "What can I do for you, Mr. Fallon?"
"Nothing, most likely." The detective sighed. "No more than the hundred and seventy-eight other pill-rollers I've talked to today." Stiff brown paper crackled as he started to unwrap a small package he took from the pocket of his topcoat. The brown paper came open and revealed more paper wrapping; paper once white but now soiled. "Ever see this before, mister?"
"I may have," the druggist replied tonelessly. "I use that kind of paper for wrapping, but so do hundreds of others. Where did you get this?"
"Off a floater the Harbor Squad picked up this morning, a stiff beat up so bad he didn't have what you could rightly call a face. The labels had been cut out of his suit and there was nothing in his pockets except a wallet chockfull of money. And this package. A safety razor is in it."
"A five dollar Shickette." Doc looked slightly sick. "You don't have to interview any more pill-rollers, Mr. Fallon. I sold it yesterday about noon, to a young man I'd never seen before."
The detective came alive then, but the questions he fired at Turner elicited only a description of the murdered man and the name he'd given, Fred Bailey. "Okay," Fallon said. "It's a lead anyways. I'll do some poking around and I'll lay you ten to one I'll find out he just moved in within two, three blocks of here."
He rewrapped his package and went out, and Jack Ransom said, "You can stop worrying about this Bailey now."
"Can I?" A spatulate thumb thoughtfully rubbed the showcase edge. "Can I, Jack? Perhaps I ought to start worrying."
"Cripes, Doc," Ransom groaned. "Don't tell me you're going to go looking for who bumped him! He wasn't one of our people."
"No," Doc mused, thinking aloud. "But death came to him because he questioned me about this neighborhood. That means the murder concerns Morris Street, so I must find out why Bailey died."
"Sounds like a tall order." Jack was by no means convinced, but from past experience he knew that argument would be futile. "You haven't a thing to go on."
"Perhaps not. And then again—it has occurred to me that something I told Bailey in my impish impulse to bait him, the way he dropped his questions and hurried out, may be a hint. I'm going to have a talk with Pigeon Charley, son. Right now!"
THE smells of alien foods, unwashed bodies and vermin-ridden
woodwork combined in the drab top-floor hallway to form the
single, unforgettable odor of poverty. As Doc turned to a scarred
door Jack Ransom said, "This is a hell of a time to wake up a
hard-working female."
"Let's hope Polixene Papalos hasn't retired yet." Doc's rap was loud in the midnight hush. "She—" He broke off, startled by the sudden response.
"Who there?" a woman cried. The voice was edged, frightened.
"It's Andrew Turner, Polixene." Doc's tone was pitched to reassuring calmness. "The druggist."
"Doc Toiner!" Neither man understood the Greek syllables that followed, but they seemed to indicate vast relief. Then a key was scraping in the lock.
The door opened on Polixene Papalos, who stood clutching a thin, colorless wrapper about her scrawny form. Doc and Jack went in and the door closed behind them. The terror that had quivered in the woman's voice was still in her sharp-featured face.
"We shouldn't have disturbed you so late," the pharmacist said, "but—" He was interrupted by a flood of words—
"Iss good you come, Doc. Iss very good." Light struck golden sparks from the cross clutched in her fist. "I don't know if I should call for Papa or cry for police."
"A priest or the police—why should you need either?" Light shone on a sewing-machine, a rack of unfinished dresses, and a small iron cot. "What was it that scared you?"
"Scare?" Polixene's frightened eyes went to an open door in the opposite wall; her lips trembled.
"Scare?" Hysteric shrillness was back in her voice. "Listen!"
Jack and Doc turned toward that door. For a moment they heard nothing save the distant nocturnal rumble of the city that never sleeps. And then a chill lay clammy against their skins.
Within the dark beyond that aperture was a flutter, very faint, and an idiot babble. Nearly human those sounds, yet terribly not human.
"Charley?" Jack murmured, "Pigeon Charley?"
The old druggist answered, "Can't be. Not he alone, at any rate. There are hundreds—"
"Iss in his room," the woman held the cross up as she whispered this. "Iss in Charley room an' no one go in there, no one can go in there unless pass me here or fly in."
"Fly!" Doc exclaimed. "Where's his room, Polixene? Take us to it."
"No," she whispered, free hand lifting terrified fingertips to her lips, the wrapper falling open to reveal a cotton nightgown hanging as though from a clothes-rack. "No-o-o." With a quick, earnest motion she kissed her cross.
"Quick!" The urgency in the old druggist's voice started her moving, sent her before them into the hallway that was no longer dark now that the light-glare was following them into the narrow musty passage.
THE light laid the shadow of the cross on the closed door
before which Polixene stopped. And now it was certain that the
flutter of movement came from behind this. The curious, throaty
noises. "Pigeons!" Ransom said hoarsely. "His pigeons!"
"No," the woman whispered. "They never come in night."
"Tonight they have," Doc insisted. "Those are pigeons cooing, flying about, and I must know why." Once more his knuckles rapped on door wood.
The chorus of pigeon cries loudened, but that was the only response, even when Turner rapped again; even when he called the man's name: "Mount! Charles Mount! Open up."
"He won't answer," Jack said.
"Or can't," the old man said, trying the knob. "And the door's locked."
"Always," Polixene offered. "Always lock. Since he come he never let me in."
Doc said, "Well—I'm getting in!"
"Okay. Get out of my way." Ransom backed against the wall. Lifting a big-thewed leg, he drove the heel of its shoe against the wood just under the lock. The door flew inward and there was a rush of wings, a wild squawking, but no challenging voice. Nothing from the man whose privacy was being so rudely invaded.
Small shadows hurtled across the open window, and beyond it the line of a roof-edge, twenty feet away, was black against sky. Doc gagged at the odor and followed the carrot-headed mechanic into the room.
Wings beat at them, seethed about their legs. "Mount!" Turner called out, sharply. "Charles Mount. Where are you?"
"What's this over here, Doc?" Jack tugged him to the right. "Looks like a bed. How about some light, Mrs. Papalos?" The bed, like everything else in the room, was covered with pigeons. The two men had to force their way through them.
Yellow luminance struck into the room from a bracket in the hall. "Lord!" Jack choked, pointing to something that jutted out of that seething mass of pigeons on the bed—a hand, stiff in death.
Doc Turner was rigid, staring. "Look, Doc," the younger man ran on. "Look. He had the sack on this shelf above his bed and it opened up somehow, spilled the crumbs down over him. He must have been asleep, or doped, so when the pigeons piled on for the feast he didn't wake up till they'd—" he swallowed hard—"till they'd smothered him to death."
The hall-light she'd turned on came slantwise in from the door and threw the shadow of Polixene Papalos, the shadow of her upheld cross, across that feathered bier—the shadow swept away and the woman pitched down to the floor.
"She's fainted," Jack exclaimed. He reached for the woman but was caught by Doc's grasping hand before he could take a step.
"Down! Down Jack!" The old man went down to the floor, dragged Jack with him. "That's not a faint."
"What—what do you mean?" the younger man demanded.
"Look."
THE pigeons had settled to peck at the crumbs that scattered
the floor from the gutted meal-sack on the shelf over Pigeon
Charley's bed, but there were no crumbs on the scrawny, still
form sprawled just within the floor. Ransom looked where Doc's
gnarled finger pointed, looked with suddenly narrowed eyes at the
crimson stain spreading on the breast of Polixene Papalos' cheap
cotton nightgown—stared at the tiny hole that centered
it.
"Shot," he murmured. "She's been shot dead."
"With an air-rifle," the old druggist confirmed, "through the window from that roof across the alley. She made an unmissable target, silhouetted against the light in the hall."
"Nice," Jack gulped, his head turning to stare at the darkness-filled aperture. "Lovely." From this angle, below it, he could see only the glowering sky. "But why her and not us?"
"Because the killer saw her first as the light went on, and before he could switch his aim to us we had dropped. But the doorway, you will observe, is directly opposite the window. If we try to get through it, even crawling, he'll have a clear shot at us."
"You mean he's got us trapped in here with two corpses and these pigeons?"
"Well," the aged druggist shrugged, "one of us might escape alive if we rushed the door, but only one at the best. Whoever is on that roof is a marksman, and the range is very short."
"Too short to suit me." Jack settled himself more comfortably against the side of Pigeon Charley's death-bed. "Well, Doc," he grinned. "Nobody can say that when you start hunting trouble, you don't find it. However, this is the screwiest mess you ever got us into. What's it all about?"
"That, my boy, is what I should dearly like to know." Turner wriggled to a position from which he could look around him more easily. "We can't do much searching. But if we use our eyes, we might get some hint."
It was like thousands of other bedrooms in the Morris Street slum flats. The paper on the walls was faded to a nondescript color. A decrepit bureau stood against the wall opposite the bed, its mirror speckled, and beside this a huge wooden wardrobe loomed. Broken hinges indicated that this had once been furnished with doors, but they had been replaced by a soiled, olive-green portiere.
In the corner beyond the door was a washstand supporting a crockery bowl and a pitcher to match. Four brown-dappled pigeons fought each other for a chance to drink from the pitcher. The pigeons were everywhere; on the unlighted chandelier, on the wide shelf that ran along this nearer wall, over the bed. "That shelf looks brand-new," Doc commented. "Wonder why he put it up. You would think there was room enough in that wardrobe for—hello," he broke off. "Now what does that mean?"
"What does what mean?" Jack demanded.
"That sack of crumbs. It didn't come open accidentally, son. Someone ripped it open. See that gash in its side, where it hangs over."
"Yeah. I see." A tiny muscle flicked over the garage mechanic's high cheekbone. "That's why the crumbs spilled down."
"Exactly." Turner brushed away a pigeon that impudently tried to peck at something under the crook of his knee. "Which makes it hardly likely that Pigeon Charley cut—"
"Polixene!" Jack exclaimed.
"No. She had no idea what had happened in here. Her terror was genuine."
"But she said that no one could have got in here without her knowing. Unless she was lying—"
"She was not lying and no one beside Charles Mount was in here." There was a ring of sudden inspiration in Doc's voice. "That bag wasn't cut open, Jack. Look at the ceiling above the shelf, there. Two feet nearer the wall."
Ransom obeyed saw a gouge in the yellowed plaster, a silvery gleam. "A bullet," he grunted. "A bullet through the window."
"Bullets, Jack. A half-dozen or more fired so as to rip the sack. Deliberately. If it had been fired at Charley, it would not have come in at that angle."
"He was shot first then, lying on the bed, and then—"
"Couldn't have been. He was on the bed when he died. He didn't fall across it, but he couldn't have been shot in that position. At that level he would have been as invisible through the window as we are. He might have been out further in the room—but if he had strength enough to get over here, why didn't he call for help? He knew Polixene could hear him." Doc's seamed countenance was bleak, but a strange light glowed in his eyes. "Let's stop guessing, Jack. Let's see if we can tell how he died."
THE old man lifted to his knees, and shooed the pigeons away.
They fluttered about angrily, but Ransom's flailing arms helped
to keep them off as the two stared at the corpse.
In the grimy undershirt, but fully dressed below the waist, Mount's body seemed so thin as to indicate starvation. The eyes were closed as if in sleep, but the whole form was held in a peculiar, paroxysmal rigidity.
Doc said, "There's no wound. No sign of—don't!" He clutched Ransom's wrist, just in time to keep him from grabbing a single pigeon that still remained on the body, its wings fluttering. "Don't touch that!"
"Why not?" The feathered creature was slate-gray and it was sleeker than the others. "Why shouldn't I? Oh, oh. I get you."
A greenish tinge spread under Jack's skin. "Gawd," he muttered. "Ain't that sweet."
The slate-gray bird had remained on the corpse because it was held there by something that had been a hand but now was swollen to mottled shapelessness. "That's a homing pigeon, my son," the old man said softly, turning to look at the wardrobe across the room. "And if we could reach that green curtain to pull it aside, we should find its brothers cooped behind it. Listen. Can't you hear cooings and flutterings that aren't coming from any birds we can see?"
Ransom cocked his head. "Yeah," he muttered after a moment. "Yeah, I can."
"That's why Mount had to build a shelf to hold his belongings," Doc pointed out. "And he fed the park birds so they would cover the flight of the homing pigeons going and coming at four in the afternoon. Lend me those gloves in your hip-pocket."
"Sure." Jack pulled out the heavy leather gauntlets. He'd been using them to protect his hands from the battery-acid he'd been mixing just before he quit work. "But what do you want them for?"
"Watch." The gloves drawn on, Turner took hold of the gray homer, gently extricated it from the dead man's clutch. "The messages they carry are written on very thin paper and placed in this sort of device." He pointed to a tiny aluminum tube fastened by a band to one pink leg. "But this one—" He pressed it with gloved fingers and a shining sliver, a quarter-inch long, darted out of it. A drop of yellowish liquid quivered from the tip of the hollow needle-point. "The message someone sent Charles Mount by this pigeon was death."
Jack rocked back on his haunches. "Why didn't they shoot him from the roof, like they did Mrs. Papalos, instead of going to all this trouble?"
"Perhaps because he was watching for that. He seems to have been expecting an attempt on his life." Doc pointed to the butt of a revolver protruding from a holster at the dead man's belt. "Evidently they didn't want attention attracted to this room by the noise of a gun fight."
"Hell. Polixene would have gotten suspicious and called somebody to break in the door."
"But not for a day or two yet..." Doc's voice trailed away as he withdrew himself into an inner realm of thought, oblivious of the corpse, of the strutting, pecking pigeons, of their weird chatter. Jack brushed away some that were trying to get back to the crumbs scattered on the body.
"What about this stuff?" he could not keep from asking. "Why the stunt with the crumbs?"
TURNER came back to attention. "Rigor mortis has come
and gone. He's been dead more than twelve hours. If the first
park pigeons had not found their regular feast awaiting them at
four this afternoon, the others would not have come and the
failure of the flock to appear might have caused an inquiry. The
whole strange aspect of this murder seems to revolve about that.
It had to be discovered sooner or later, but the killers seem to
be fighting for time. Why, Jack? Why is it so important for them
to stave off discovery?"
"Search me." Ransom's hand flung out in a gesture of bafflement—struck a fold of paper close to the corpse. He picked up the paper. "Isn't this the kind of paper you said the pigeon messages are written on?"
"Yes."
"Then this—look, there's writing on it. Maybe Charley was writing on it when that death-bird showed up." He held it so that the light from the hall door would fall on it. "Maybe it'll tell us—heck! It's in code."
"Not in code, son," Doc said softly. "In the language of the country we're arming to defend ourselves against." He took the paper from the other's fingers. "'Habe Wort ge—' Wait, I'll translate. It says, 'Have received word to continue as before, but this must be some mistake. To remain is dangerous after last night's event, even though the spy on the roof was silenced—'"
"Silenced," Ransom broke in. "Killed, he means. Bailey must have been an F.B.I. man or from Military Intelligence!"
"Yes," said the aged druggist sadly. "Yes. And my little joke sent him to his death." He went back to his translating: 'But I fear he may not have been working alone. Insist provision be made to get me safely away. My abilities are too valuable to chance capture for sake of one project.'"
Turner glanced at the moribund countenance on the bed. "His friends were evidently of a different opinion. Whether they thought he was getting too jittery to serve them any longer, or were afraid he might have been identified and so would be a danger to them, they decided to get rid of him."
"That's what it looks like," Jack agreed. "Is that all, Doc?"
"No. There's another sentence." Turner's gaze returned to the paper, but instead of reading aloud again, his mustached mouth thinned, straightened, and his neck corded.
"What is it?" Jack demanded. "What does it say?"
"Enough to tell me that the project he speaks of is the blowing up of the Atlas Machine Works, at the foot of Hogbund Lane." The old eyes lifted to Ransom's face, and there was horror in them. "There are sixty men of Morris Street working there tonight, Jack, and they'll die—"
"Tonight! Does he say—"
"No. But it's evident. I said before that they were stalling for time, and not much time at that. Mount's murder must be discovered very soon. The trick with the pigeons can't be worked again. They know this set-up must become public by morning. They haven't abandoned their plans or that killer would not be out there on the roof, watching this room. They've got to carry them out tonight or never."
"Proven!" It was Jack's eyes that were blazing now. "We've got to get out of here, Doc. We've got to get a warning to Atlas, somehow." He came up to his knees again. "I'm going to make a dash for that door—"
"And get a bullet in your neck for your pains? Wait a minute." The old man was glancing around the room for inspiration. "I'll think of something—I've got it!" He twisted to the bed, took hold of the mattress. "Help me."
Ransom knew better than to ask any questions at a moment like this. His big fists got their hold on the bedding and at a muttered word from Turner he heaved.
THE corpse rolled against the wall. Almost without words, so
often had they worked together that they hardly needed words for
communication, the two men swung the mattress around so that they
held it behind their backs, and then they were erect, were
lurching, like some grotesque four-legged monster across the room
through a swirling cloud of pigeons.
A thump against the hair-stuffed armor, another, as bullets came in through the window, and they were in the passage outside, a solid wall between them and the silent air rifle on the roof. "It worked," Jack grunted as he dropped the bag of ticking on which a man had died. "I didn't think it would."
"It had to," Doc puffed, trying to keep up with his long-legged strides. "Matted horsehair has been proven better protection against air rifle slugs than twice the thickness of wood." They came into the lighted room where Polixene Papalos would spend no more weary hours at her sewing machine, made for the flat door.
Jack grabbed its knob, pulled it open. "Back," a guttural voice said, and some thing hard pounded into his midriff. "Back, or I puncture you."
The gun shoved the carrot-headed young mechanic back into the room. The blond giant who held it followed him in and another man, shorter, rock-jawed, came in behind him and poked a blue-steel Luger at Doc, who'd stopped short between the sewing machine and a dressmaker's dummy. This one kicked the door shut behind him, and the blond one said, "Just in time we are, Otto, hein!"
"Jawohl, Gauleiter Kirsch."
The little man,The little man, Otto, had eyes set close together and they were the hue of Antarctic ice. "Rudolph vas not able to keep these men in dot room, evidently."
"Rudolph is a clumsy ox," the Gauleiter rumbled. "I knew why I gave him strict orders to signal us der minute any vun should come. Him I will deal with later. It is these two whom we must silence now."
"That will do you no good," Doc said conversationally. "We have already sent word of your plot against the Atlas, and your men there are being placed under arrest." He seemed almost ridiculous, the little white-haired man beside the headless and wire-skirted black bust of the clothes form. Like a surrealistic painting.
"You lie," Kirsch told him. "There are no telephones in this flat."
"You forget Charles Mount's homing pigeons, don't you? Or is his name really Karl Berg? Your man Rudolph shot two of those we released through the window, but the third got away safely."
"The pigeons!" Kirsch's rumble of laughter was mocking. "What sort of fool you think I am? Those pigeons fly only to their own cote—in my headquarters!"
"Exactly," the old druggist agreed.
"You don't think Fred Bailey was working alone, do you? As soon as he discovered your communication center here, he arranged for airplane observation that spotted the flight of the pigeons, marked down where it ended. Your headquarters were raided half an hour ago, Gauleiter Kirsch."
"Raided!" The blond giant blinked, and in that instant Doc Turner hurled Polixene's dummy at him. His gun pounded, but the bullet tore into the papier maché form and the little old man had leaped. Jack left his feet in a diving tackle under Otto's orange-red bullet flash. His hands closed on the smaller Nazi; he tossed him into his leader.
The two went down in a scramble, and Ransom somersaulted out into the hallway. He slammed the door shut, locked it with the key he'd snatched from inside and catapulted down the stairs after Doc. Jack caught up to the little old man, half-helped, half-carried him down the steep tenement stairs, while doors opened on landings and startled faces stared out.
And then they were out in the deserted slum street, running towards the River where the lights of the Atlas Machine Works made bright holes in the night. "Stop!" a voice bellowed at them. "Stop, or I'll shoot."
They came upon the burly figure who'd shouted. It was the detective, Fallon, his gun drawn. He thrust it at them and yelled, "It's the druggist from the corner, by all that's—What was that shooting I heard?"
"That was the excitement you were complaining about not finding on a police job," Doc Turner said sweetly. "If you'll go up to the top floor of this house we've just come out of, you'll find it still going on."
"Yeah," Jack Ransom told him. "Where the pigeons are. Get going, copper. I've got business to attend to."
He whirled and was pounding down Hogbund Lane to attend to that business, leaving a white-haired old man to explain. The dazed detective scratched his head and muttered, "Pigeons? Here I'm investigating a homicide and the guy talks about pigeons!"
Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
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