Rosenblatt grinned. “I believed you,” he said. “In a way. I had a feeling that you had nailed something, I mean. But I couldn’t see just what. It was too simple and obvious, I suppose. Like the card you had in your pocket, which named him all the time.”
“What card?” I said.
He handed me a pasteboard.
“I was looking through your jacket, that you had left on the front seat of that coupe of yours, while you were down at the sawmill,” he said apologetically. “You had this card in your side pocket. The killer’s name and address, and all.”
I took it from him. It was the card which had been given to me by old John Buchanan’s housekeeper, with the address of the dealer to whom I was to deliver the car, and which I had thrust away in my pocket, together with the envelope containing the fee, without looking at it. I looked at it now.
Dexter’s Day & Nite Garage 6I4 West 14th Street, N. Y. C.
Tel: Mordaunt 2-8350
Cars Bought and Sold, Top Prices
A. M. Dexter,
Professor of Automobilistics,
Proprietor.
And on it the housekeeper had written four words, with an arrow pointing to the name: “This is the man.”
In my pocket all the time.
I thought again, as I put the card away without a word, of that instructor from Harvard whom I had had at Southern State, who had always objected with such outraged horror to being addressed as professor. A professor, he had said, was a high-school manual-training teacher, a piano player in a honkytonk, or the proprietor of a flea circus. Old Adam MacComerou of Homicidal Psychopathology, with all his degrees and all that was in his brain, had never called himself professor on his mailbox or in big red Who’s Who in America or on the title page of his book itself, when I thought of it. Maybe he would rather be struck dead than be called professor.
Well, he had been. No one had ever called him professor or doctor to his face, anyway—old A. MacComerou with his great old brain that had known so much of murder. Yet that bald-skulled naked marble-eyed goon had introduced himself to me as “Professor MacComerou” in the garden in the twilight when I had first come upon him, and I had swallowed it. He had been a professor, all right. A professor of automobilistics. And I had asked him for a garage man.
I nodded toward the living-room door, as Rosenblatt got up to leave the bedroom and find a phone.
“What do you have to tell her when she wakes up?” I said.
“What is there to tell?” he said.
“Nothing but that it was all a nightmare,’“ I said. “A bad dream without reality.”
“That’s all it ever was,” he said.
And that is all it will ever be between her and me. A man came into her life and vanished. A spade dropped on my foot and hurt it. Though I shall limp a little when I smell yellow roses and black rich garden earth, all through life.
About the Author
Joel Townsley Rogers (1896-1984) was one of the great short story writers of the pulp era, best known for The Red Right Hand, which came out first in 1945.
About the Publisher
280 Steps is a publisher of crime, noir and hardboiled fiction. Discover new writers and crime classics.
For more information about 280 Steps and our titles, please visit 280steps.com
Copyright
Copyright © renewed 1972 by Joel Townsley Rogers
Introduction copyright © 2013 by Martin Edwards
First eBook edition: February 2014
Published by 280 Steps. Visit us at 280steps.com
Cover design by Risa Rodil
eISBN: 978-82-93326-19-9
Publishers note:
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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The Red Right Hand Page 19