He said:
“Reno wants to see you.”
“Where will I find him?”
“Jump in.”
“I can’t go now,” I said. “Probably not till afternoon.”
“See Peak when you’re ready.”
I said I would. O’Marra and his companion drove on up Green Street. I walked half a block south to the Rutledge Block.
With a foot on the first of the rickety steps that led up to the lawyer’s floor, I stopped to look at something.
It was barely visible back in a dim corner of the first floor. It was a shoe. It was lying in a position that empty shoes don’t lie in.
I took my foot off the step and went toward the shoe. Now I could see an ankle and the cuff of a black pants-leg above the shoe-top.
That prepared me for what I found.
I found Mr. Charles Proctor Dawn huddled among two brooms, a mop and a bucket, in a little alcove formed by the back of the stairs and a corner of the wall. His Vandyke beard was red with blood from a cut that ran diagonally across his forehead. His head was twisted sidewise and backward at an angle that could only be managed with a broken neck.
I quoted Noonan’s, “What’s got to be done has got to be done,” to myself, and, gingerly pulling one side of the dead man’s coat out of the way, emptied his inside coat pocket, transferring a black book and a sheaf of papers to my own pocket. In two of his other pockets I found nothing