house.
I was half a block from it when something changed my mind and my destination.
A smallish young man in three shades of brown crossed the street ahead of me. His dark profile was pretty. He was Max Thaler, alias Whisper. I reached the corner of Mountain Boulevard in time to catch the flash of his brown-covered rear leg vanishing into the late Donald Willsson’s doorway.
I went back to Broadway, found a drug store with a phone booth in it, searched the directory for Elihu Willsson’s residence number, called it, told somebody who claimed to be the old man’s secretary that I had been brought from San Francisco by Donald Willsson, that I knew something about his death, and that I wanted to see his father.
When I made it emphatic enough I got an invitation to call.
The czar of Poisonville was propped up in bed when his secretary—a noiseless slim sharp-eyed man of forty—brought me into the bedroom.
The old man’s head was small and almost perfectly round under its close-cut crop of white hair. His ears were too small and plastered too flat to the sides of his head to spoil the spherical effect. His nose also was small, carrying down the curve of his bony forehead. Mouth and chin were straight lines chopping the sphere off. Below them a short thick neck ran down into white pajamas between square meaty shoulders. One of his arms was outside the covers, a short compact arm that ended in a thick-fingered blunt hand. His eyes were round, blue, small and watery. They looked as if they were hiding behind the watery film and under the bushy white brows only until the time came to jump out and grab something. He wasn’t the sort of man whose pocket you’d try to pick unless you had a lot of confidence in your fingers.