nodded to me: Austin Richter, owner of a Market Street moving picture theater. He was a round-faced man of forty-five or so, partly bald, for whom the agency had done some work a year or so before in connection with a ticket-seller who had departed without turning in the day’s receipts.
In front of Richter a thin white-haired man with doctor written all over him stood looking at Richter’s leg, which was wrapped in a bandage just below the knee. Beside the doctor, a tall woman in a fur-trimmed dressing-gown stood, a roll of gauze and a pair of scissors in her hands. A husky police corporal was writing in a notebook at a long narrow table, a thick hickory walking stick laying on the bright blue table cover at his elbow.
All of them looked around at us as we came into the room. The corporal got up and came over to us.
“I knew you were handling the Rounds job, sergeant, so I thought I’d best get word to you as soon as I heard they was brown men mixed up in this.”
“Good work, Flynn,” O’Gar said. “What happened here?”
“Burglary, or maybe only attempted burglary. They was four of them—crashed the kitchen door.”
Richter was sitting up very straight, and his blue eyes were suddenly excited, as were the brown eyes of the woman.
“I beg your pardon,” he said, “but is there—you mentioned brown men in connection with another affair—is there another?”
O’Gar looked at me.
“You haven’t seen the morning papers?” I asked the theatre owner.