"I meant it. This is no ordinary man. It wasn't buck fever at all. I couldn't have faced him myself if I hadn't rattled him with that lucky shot."
The patrolman wanted to believe. He most pathetically wanted to believe. "Honest?"
"It's the God's honest truth. No man could have stood in front of that killer and pulled a trigger. He's a master hypnotist. You're all right. We won't say a word about what happened in here. And you'll have no trouble in the future."
The patrolman shook his head. "Still, I gotta do something about it."
"Talk to your psychiatrist," Taber said. "In the meantime, keep that crowd out there from spilling in here."
Taber pushed out through the choked entrance to the areaway and went back up the street. It was alive with activity now and he passed unnoticed. No one recognized him as the man who had given chase in the bloody business that would make headlines that evening in every New York newspaper.
And yet the radio and TV news commentators gave it no special attention. It went in along with other items of the day's news as a more or less routine big-city happening.
One national-hookup headliner stated: "In New York City today, a man identified as John Dennis, address unknown, went berserk in a fashionable Upper East Side apartment. Dennis, wielding a knife, killed a man and a woman, and seriously wounded another man before he was cut down by police bullets.
"A jet airliner, down in the North Atlantic today, imperiled the lives of seventy-six ..."