Her husband’s palm pressed over her mouth, firm but not rough, stopped her. “You talk too much, darling,” he said tolerantly.
“It’s her sense of humor,” Aunt Margaret explained. “All the same, Ann dear, it is out of place, with poor Sidney just cruelly murdered. Cruelly. ”
“Nuts,” Dick Savage snapped.
“It was cruel,” his mother insisted. “Murder is cruel.”
“Sure it was,” he agreed, “but for us Sid has been dead more than two years, and he’s been alive again only two weeks, and we never even saw him, so what do you expect?”
“I suggest,” Beebe the lawyer put in, in a high thin voice that fitted his stature perfectly, “that this is rather a public spot for a private discussion. Shall we go?”
“I can’t,” Ann declared. “Mr. Goodwin is going to wear me down and finally break me. Look at his hard gray eyes. Look at his jaw.”
“Now, darling,” Norman Horne said affectionately, and took her elbow and started her toward the door. The others filed after them, with Beebe in the rear. Not one mentioned the pleasure it had given them to meet me, though the lawyer did let me have a nod of farewell as he went by.
As I stood and watched the door closing behind them the veteran female’s voice came. “Mr. Mandelbaum will see you, Mr. Goodwin.”
Only two assistant district attorneys rate corner rooms, and Mandelbaum wasn’t one of them. Halfway down the corridor, his door was standing open, and, entering, I had a surprise. Mandelbaum was at his desk, and across from him, on one of the two spare chairs that the little room sported, was a big husky guy with graying hair, a broad red face, and gray eyes that had been found hard to meet by tougher babies than Mrs. Norman Horne. If she called mine hard she should have seen those of Inspector Cramer of Homicide.