Gold Comes in Bricks by A. A. Fair (Erle Stanley Gardner) Read Free Book Online

lairs, made up my mind I’d picked the wrong end of the hallway, and started back.
    I was still twenty feet from the L when I heard three shots. A second or two later I heard running steps in the corridor going in the other direction.
    I ran around the right-angled turn. The door of four-nineteen was open. An oblong of light was streaming out into the hallway. I looked at my watch—eleven-sixteen. The elevator boy would have gone off duty, leaving the elevator on automatic.
    I pressed the call button, and, as soon as I heard the cage start upward, went into four-nineteen on tiptoe.
    Ringold’s body was huddled in front of the step that led up to the bathroom. His head was doubled back under his shoulders. His arms were twisted out at a goofy angle. One knee was just inside the door to the bathroom. The left arm was pressing up against the connecting door to four-twenty-one.
    I dipped my fingers into the right-hand coat pocket and felt the perforated edges of a folded oblong of paper. I didn’t take time to look at it. I jerked it out, stuck it in my pocket, turned, and ran for the corridor. The light switch was near the door. I switched the lights out and stood for a moment in the doorway, looking up and down the corridor. The only person in sight was a woman about fifty-five or sixty with her hair done up in curlers who was hugging a red robe around her, and standing in the open doorway of a room down at the end of the corridor.
    “Did you hear someone shoot?” I called to her.
    “Yes,” she said.
    I jerked my thumb toward four-twenty-one. “I think it came from four-twenty-one. I’ll go see.”
    She continued to stand in the doorway. I walked over abreast of the elevator, called out, “He’s got a ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign over the door. I guess I’d better go down to the office.”
    The elevator was waiting. I opened it, rode down to the second floor, got out, and waited.
    It seemed as much as a minute before I heard the elevator taken back down to the first floor, and then saw it go rattling back up. The indicator showed that it had stopped at the fourth. I walked down the stairs and out into the lobby. The clerk wasn’t behind the desk. The blond girl at the cigar counter was reading a movie magazine. Her jaws were moving slowly with the rhythmic chewing of gum. She glanced up, then back to her magazine.
    After I got out on the street I took the folded oblong of paper out of my pocket and looked at it. It was a check payable to cash in the amount of ten thousand dollars. It was signed Alta Ashbury.
    I put it in my pocket and walked down to the place where Bertha Cool had left the car. It was gone. I stood there for a minute and didn’t see any sign of Bertha. I walked three blocks, picked up a taxi, gave the address of the Union Depot. When I got there I dropped the hotel key into a mailbox, picked up another cab, and gave the address of a swanky apartment hotel three blocks from where Ashbury had his residence. I paid off the cab, and, after he drove away, walked down to the Ashbury place.
    The butler was still up. He let me in although Ashbury had given me a key.
    “Miss Ashbury in yet?” I asked.
    “Yes, sir. She came in about ten minutes ago.”
    “Tell her I’m waiting on the sunporch,” I said, “and that it’s important.”
    He looked at me for a moment, blinked his eyes, and said, “Very well, sir.”
    I went out on the sunporch and sat down. Alta came down in about five minutes. She swept into the room with her chin up in the air. “There’s nothing you can say,” she said, “no explanation you can make.”
    “Sit down,” I said.
    She hesitated a moment, then sat down.
    I said, “I’m going to tell you something. I want you to remember it. Think it over tonight and remember it tomorrow. You were tired and nervous. You canceled a date. You went to a movie, but couldn’t stick it out. You came back home. You haven’t been anywhere else. You understand?”
    She said, “I came down