The Dead of Winter by William H Hallahan

Author:William H Hallahan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MysteriousPress.com/Open Road
Published: 2019-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

According to the first receipt, Mr. Pell had turned over to Charlie’s Laundry four sheets, two pillow cases, three towels, two face cloths.

Lyons put the laundry receipts back in the envelope and resumed studying Pell’s other papers. A recent telephone bill. Lyons laid it aside for further study. Checkbook stubs and several bank statements. Check stubs were quite ordinary: taxes on house, cash, furnace oil, electric bill, paint, property insurance.

Lyons walked over to his couch-bed and lay down. If he could regain his strength and think, he’d solve the riddles. In a moment he was sound asleep.

Sunday morning, he pondered all the material in the light of a bluff day, racing cloud shadows blocking the morning sun at whiles.

His floor was bespread with papers: airline schedules and passenger tickets, laundry receipts and coded books—all the bits and lumps he’d gathered in a temporal sequence, reading from left to right, top to bottom, starting with Fleagle’s diary. Neat rows of information set on the floor before him like an orchestra, each with its piece of pipe if only he had ears to hear.

Sunlight of a bluff day spread at whiles with cloud shadows.

Water cured his headache slowly. The pain went away with the thirst.

“Speak,” he said to the papers.

A quick tapping at his basement window—and he looked up at Roger Basche, peering in with a shielding hand over his eyes.

Lyons padded to the understeps vestibule and let him in.

“Have you seen the paper?” demanded Basche, following him into the room.

“How about coffee?”

“In a minute. Have you seen the paper?”

“No.”

Basche glanced at the rows of material on the floor and sighed heavily. “Here. Read this.”

It was right on the front page of the Sunday paper. And Lyons read with his mouth fallen open.

MYSTERY MAN, TWO OTHERS, SLAIN IN DETROIT HOME.

DETROIT: Anthony Pell, a mystery man whom police have often tried unsuccessfully to link with the American underworld, was found shot to death in the bathroom of his expensive home in Grosse Pointe Farms, a fashionable section of Detroit. In the kitchen, his housekeeper and his chauffeur-bodyguard were also found dead. Both had been stabbed.

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