Murder at Large

BY LESLEY FROST
Editor of “COME CHRISTMAS”
PUBLISHED IN NEW YORK BY COWARD-McCANN, INC.
COPYRIGHT, 1932, BY COWARD-McCANN, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
PRINTED IN THE U. S. A. BY THE VAN REES PRESS
Ordway Belknap, ex-Judge of the Magistrate’s Courts, and for the present a detective of amateur standing, and a semi-professional criminologist, on call at the Homicide Department, leaned comfortably back in an arm-chair in the den of his spacious penthouse apartment on the East River—in Gracie Square to be exact. James, the perfect ‘man’ that confirmed bachelors dream of one day possessing, entered soundlessly on the deep-napped carpet, and, in a cotton-wool voice, announced Judge Whittaker on the wire.
“Thank you, James,” murmured Belknap in a tone modulated to the atmosphere of the room; while James, with the smooth precision of the Roxy Orchestra being lowered, sank from view, the den being a floor to itself.
Belknap slowly ground out a freshly lit cigarette and meditatively examined the telephone at his elbow. His face gathered seriousness as a window gathers steam. He recalled Whittaker’s remark of a week ago, made as they passed at the Club: “I will give you a ring soon on a matter of life and death. No, I can’t go into it now—I’m running.” And though in the meanwhile the matter had slipped his mind he now unaccountably, even to himself, hesitated to remove the receiver.
Belknap was a man of fifty-odd, but didn’t look it; tall, handsome, with a firm mouth, burning brown eyes, and thick, lustrous black hair. His muscles were steel-hard; and his skin always deeply bronzed, winter and summer alike, for he was one of those elusive and self-styled members of the Long Beach nature club. He enjoyed motoring down on brilliant days even in January to nurse a driftwood fire in the shelter of a shallow dune, basking himself in fire heat and violet ray.
Sun-bathing is the habit of a solitary; but then, Belknap was a solitary in more ways than one. He loved the slow, indolent afternoons, apparently wasted, and with no words spoken. He relished the mingled smell of olive oil, wood smoke and salt; and the sight, through more than half-shut eyes, of gulls, and a ship moving up the horizon like the large hand of a clock, invisibly moving yet seen to have moved. Rodney Drake would periodically rise like an elongated Pict out of the waste of sand and gesticulate against the sky. On the open beach the hardy little Egyptian, name unknown, would squat motionless on his heels over a tin firebox.