The Case of the Stuttering Bishop by Erle Stanley Gardner

the running board and ran back into the shadows by one of the docks. The car drove slowly on. Bixler saw the bird turn down a side street, cross over to another road, speed up, and then make a turn and come back around down the same street.
    "Bixler figured this guy might give him a lift, so he stood out in the middle of the street. The car came along, still running about ten or fifteen miles an hour, and then the woman in the white rain coat ran out in front of the headlights and flagged it to a stop again. Bixler started toward the car. He said it was about fifty yards away. The woman in the rain coat stood on the running board and, all of a sudden, Bixler saw flashes and heard an automatic go Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! He can't be certain whether it was five shots or six, but he thinks it was five. The woman in the rain coat jumped down off the running board and started to sprint for a spur track where the road runs into one of the docks. Bixler waited a minute and then ran toward the coupe. Before he got to the car, he saw a light sedan – he thinks it was a Chevrolet, but he isn't certain – and he thinks the driver was the woman in the white rain coat, but he can't be too certain of that. Anyway, the car went out with a roar and the rain swallowed up the tail light in nothing flat.
    "Bixler reached the coupe. The driver had slumped over against the door on the left of the car. His arm, shoulder and head were hanging out, with blood streaming down the side of the car to the running board. Bixler says it was Renwold Brownley and that he was pumped full of lead – as dead as a mackerel."
    "How does he know it was Brownley?" Mason asked.
    "I went into that with him, too. You see, this guy's a yachtsman, and Brownley's a yachtsman. They'd met once or twice at dinners at the Yacht Club, and Bixler had seen Brownley around the Club on half a dozen occasions. He swears there was no chance that he was mistaken; that the man was Brownley. It had been raining hard, but there was a little let-up in the rain about the time of the shooting, and a floodlight from the Yacht Club gave some illumination, and then there was the light from the dashboard in the coupe."
    "Then what happened?" Drake asked.
    "Bixler started running, looking for a telephone or help of some kind. And I figured he was plenty rattled. He ran along the boulevard for a ways, then he went down to the car track, ran along it for a while, got mixed up on some sidings, came stumbling back, and saw my headlights. He said that must have been about five or ten minutes after the shooting. I picked him up, and he was rattled, so nervous he could hardly talk. He tried to direct me back to the place where the shooting had taken place and couldn't find it. We drove around and around, and I thought the bird was nuts. I'd have passed it all off as a pipe dream if I hadn't been trailing old Renwold Brownley myself and known that he must have been somewhere around.
    "So this bird kept yelping he wanted to telephone the police, and I figured I might not be in so good with the law if I kept running around in circles, so I ran him up to a telephone and we called the cops."
    "Then what happened?" Mason asked.
    "The cops showed up and listened to what we had to say and…"
    "You didn't tell 'em you'd been tailing Brownley, did you?" Drake interrupted.
    "Not a chance," the man said scornfully as though resenting the question. "I said I was just driving along, trying to find a party who was on a yacht. I said I was working on a divorce case."
    "They ask you who the party was, or anything of that sort?"
    "Not yet. They will later. They were too busy then. I let on she was a blonde."
    "Could the police find the car?"
    "No; now this is the funny thing: They figured, and I figured, that this guy Bixler was all mixed up and confused and just hadn't pointed out the right spot, but then one of the cops, prowling around with a flashlight, saw a reddish stain in the rain water on the pavement at