Pale Betrayer by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

happened down the street …”
    “Just tell it the best you can,” Herring said. “Don’t worry what it means.”
    “The boss called up at 8:00 A.M. He was mighty sore and I can’t blame him none. That damn-fool absentminded doctor forgot to padlock the door last night. He closed it all right, but forgot to snap the padlock on it. The boss thought it was me, you see, and I’d just as soon he didn’t find out.”
    The situation suggested just one thing to the policemen: whoever had taken the car out was in a hurry.
    Herring snapped off the machine and rolled up the tape. He took it along to have transcribed for Bolardo to sign.
    Redmond and Marks left the watchman with a hasp of “Wanted” flyers to see if he could find a familiar face among them. Redmond could think offhand of several known criminals who sometimes passed themselves off as doctors. A check was made to learn whether any M.D. license plates had been reported stolen. The results on both lines of inquiry: negative.
    Fitzgerald put his finger on what proved the most significant link between testimonies to the hour: the precision of the wound and the nature of the weapon. A surgical knife fit the description perfectly, and it would very nearly have required a doctor’s hand to do so clean a job. There was no report yet on the bloodstained handkerchief.
    “Surgeons don’t ordinarily carry instruments out of the hospital, do they?” Redmond mused aloud.
    “Only when they have homicide on their minds,” Fitzgerald said, and curled his lip nastily.
    Redmond colored to the roots of his dark red hair. He said nothing, but went to his desk and set noisily about the routine of his command. Marks sympathized with him. Technically in charge of the investigation, he was not really on his own until Fitzgerald let go, and this the old man showed no signs of doing at the moment. Marks put another yellow-headed pin on the area map, marking the location of the Eastside Lumber Company, and wrote the legend for it on a card for the chart.
    Fitzgerald watched till he was through. “This one’s got everything, Dave. Even spooks. What do you make of this?” He handed Marks the interrogation report on the news vendor at the corner of the University and the park. Hank Zabrisky’s testimony read in part:
“Q. Do you mean Dr. Steinberg?
    A. The one with the glasses, yes. He come by the stand about ten thirty and asks me if I’d seen Professor Bradley. I says at first I had. Then I remembered it was the young lady, Miss Russo, I seen. But there’s something screwy about it. I don’t remember seeing him and yet I felt at the time I did, you know? …”
    Fitzgerald said: “Did he or didn’t he?”
    “It might be worth another try,” Marks said. He wanted to go over the university ground himself anyway. He thought of asking Redmond for the use of a better car. The time didn’t seem right somehow.
    Marks took seven feet of bus stop in which to park. A young student leaning on the route sign, an open book dangling from his hand, watched him cynically. The boy’s eyes wandered toward the corner restaurant: the cop enjoying illegal parking privileges. Marks wondered if he would ever get over the little twinges of guilt he felt at such moments. He had thought of lunch, seeing the restaurant. But not now. Go parse your nouns, sonny: he took a long slow look at him, and the boy moved away.
    This was the corner at which Anne Russo had got off the bus. The newsstand was across the street. And across the street in the other direction was the public phone booth. The laboratory building was two blocks beyond the main university building, its entrance around the corner and out of sight from where Marks stood. He passed up the news vendor for the moment, and followed what he assumed to have been Anne Russo’s route of the night before. From the park east, once you had passed the University, this became as tough an area as any in the city. It had been for over a hundred years.