Page:Weird Tales Volume 8 Number 2 (1926-08).djvu/52

194 porter, because he held to facts and facts alone. I could see that he had been badly shaken. That was why Terry's boisterous joviality had jarred his nerves.

"What makes you think you saw him?" I asked Lazy quietly.

"What makes me think that I see you?" he retorted. "Because you're standing there, looking at me, and I can describe the clothes you have on, the way you have your hands in your pockets, the expression on your face. Well, that's the way I saw him. Last night, coming back to the office from an assignment, I came face to face with him. It wasn't dark there on that corner, so I had a chance to notice everything about him.

"My God, Nick, I nearly bumped into him before I saw who it was. There he was, with his right hand—the one that had the two fingers shot off—fumbling with his coat lapel the way he always did when he was on the witness stand, and with that horrible smile on his face, his lips twisted up so I could see the hole in the upper jaw where his teeth were missing.

"I wasn't asleep, and I hadn't been hitting the pipe in Chinatown. Either the Butcher wasn't executed, or else I saw his ghost. But I did see him! I'll swear to that with my dying breath."

Terry's face had lost its bantering expression. It was strangely sober for him, and he met my eyes with a puzzled frown.

"By golly, Lazy sounds plausible," he said with a slight grin. "Maybe the prison records would bear looking into; what say, Nick? The Butcher had quite a following, such as they were. Could the body have been exhumed, do you think, or"

"Good Lord, no!" I snorted at them. "You kids talk like a dime novel. Believe me, when the prison doctor pronounces a criminal dead, he's dead! The Butcher probably has a double, or"

There came a shout from the office boy, who was leaning out of the telephone booth near by.

"Paging Nick the Dick! Detective Nicholas Brunna wanted on the Chronicle's high-powered telephone!"

"I told them I'd be over here in case of emergency," I explained to the boys, and stepped inside the booth. It was the chief at the other end of the wire. And the terse sentences that he flung at me made a queer tingling sensation noticeable at the roots of my hair.

"Get over here as soon as possible. Roscoe McKenna, millionaire oil operator, has been murdered. It looks like the work of the late Three-Finger Butcher. Probably one of his gang. Get busy on it right away, will you?"

And he hung up.

is usually very little excitement at central headquarters about anything that happens. "A murder a day keeps the blues away," as Terry McGinnis phrased the situation. We don't get any more excited over a fancy crime than you do over the things that happen in the routine of your day's business. It's a steady grind for us, quite different from the melodramatic guff that's written about it in novels.

But on this particular day, I could see that there was a suppressed tension in the air. Two of the operators were arguing hotly as I passed through the main office, and their conversation reminded me strongly of the one I had overheard in the Chronicle's office.

"D'you mean to tell me I'm so blind that I can't tell who I'm looking at? I tell you I saw him, yes sir, right in front of me."

"Well, it was his double, then, because that guy was croaked at the pen last May."

I paused for an instant, alert to the peculiarity of the situation.

"Arguing about the Three-Finger