The woman shrank back against the counter. “Murdered?”
The officer bawled a command to the neck-craning group at the entrance to stand back. Without answering the housekeeper’s question, he looked quickly about the store till he spied a telephone on a shelf behind the counter. The woman listened abstractedly as he called a number and spoke a few words into the transmitter. Then he stepped out from behind the counter and faced her.
“Your boss is lying on the floor in there,” he announced, jerking his huge head toward the inner room, “with a knife wound in his chest. He was breathing his last just as I got to him.”
The housekeeper jerked herself up, a look of sullen passion in her blanched face. “Breathing his last, was he?” Her voice was loud and shrill. “Then he wasn’t dead yet! If you’d hurried, as I told you to, we might have saved his life. I’ll report you for this, Officer Pinto.”
“Cut that stuff! Nothing could have saved him. He was too far gone. Say,” and Pinto bored his sharp eyes into her twitching face, “what name was signed to that letter?”
Twice she opened her lips to speak, but no words came.
“Out with it! You’ve got to tell me now.”
The woman swallowed. “Why do you want to know?” she asked faintly.
“I’ve got a reason. Just as Gage was drawing his last breath, I got down beside him and asked him if he could tell me who stabbed him. I guess he read my lips; anyhow, he was able to whisper a name. I want to know if it jibes with the name signed to the letter Gage got yesterday.”
“Well, then”—she pressed her hands against her breast—“the name on the letter was the Gray Phantom’s.”