A slight, white-faced man with his coat collar turned up and the brim of his soft black hat turned down as much as possible to cover his face came up to them and said, “Hello, Solly. Hello, Mister Green,” in a soft muffled voice. He took a short snub-nosed revolver out of his overcoat pocket and shot Solly in the stomach twice. Solly slipped and fell side-wise against Green and they both fell; Solly took two more slugs that were intended for Green. The cold magnified the roar of the gun to thunder. The wind whipped around the corner and the brim of the white-faced man’s hat blew up and Green recognized Giuseppe Picelli, Number Three Barber.
Then Green and Solly were a tangled mass of threshing arms and legs on the icy sidewalk and Picelli turned and ran east on Forty-ninth Street.
On the third floor of the rooming house at Three Thirty-two West Ninetieth, directly across the street from Three Thirty-one, a man sat motionlessly at the window of the large dimly lighted front room. He had taken off the tweed Chesterfield he had worn when he left the Boston train at One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street, and his suit coat; he sat in his deep-pink silk shirt-sleeves on the edge of a heavily upholstered chair, leaning forward to peer steadily through the slit under the drawn window shade.
From time to time he lighted a fresh cigarette from the butt of the last, glanced at his watch; these were the sole disturbances to his rigid immobility, his entirely silent vigil.
At two thirty-six the phone rang. He picked it up from the floor with his eyes on the slit, grunted: “Yeah.”
He listened silently for perhaps a minute, then said: “What the hell difference does it make whether Green recognized you or not if he’s dead?... Oh, you’re not sure. They both fell, but you’re not sure” — his tone dripped sarcasm — “Well, you’d better make sure. I don’t care how you do it, you’ve had your orders. Check on it some way and then come on up here, and be careful when you come in.”
He put the phone on the floor, lighted a fresh cigarette.
Demetrios said: “I don’t know nothing about it.”
Doyle glanced swiftly at the detective lieutenant who had accompanied him. “Well, we figured you’d want to know,” he mumbled.
Demetrios pulled his bright yellow dressing-gown more closely around his shoulders, shivered slightly, nodded.