Miss Lizzie by Walter Satterthwait Read Free Book Online Page B

moment speechless.
    I looked up from the afghan. Miss Lizzie, Officer Medley, and the officer called Frank were all staring toward the parlor door. I turned.
    The man who stood there was not exceedingly tall, perhaps a shade below six feet in height, but he seemed much taller because he held his body in a posture so stiffly upright that he might have been a Doric column. Beneath short curly black hair threaded with gray were two thick black eyebrows; and, beneath these, eyes of a color so dark that they too seemed black. A hawklike nose thrust out above broad sensual mouth. The dark face was square and hard, as though it had been sculpted from a single block of granite, a visage of flat planes and sharp angles. He had no mustache; the sculptor had not, perhaps, dared attempt one.
    He was, I would have said, in his mid-fifties; but he seemed immensely fit: broad shoulders, broad and muscular chest, a stomach as flat as a slab of marble. He wore civilian clothes—black shoes, black trousers, white shirt, black tie—but he wore them as a military officer might, starched and pressed, all the creases razor sharp. One expected, almost, to see a swagger stick wedged beneath his arm.
    It would have been wedged, of necessity, beneath his right arm—for he had no left. The left sleeve was neatly folded back and pinned to itself just above the spot where his elbow should have been.
    If you browse through any popular magazine of those years following World War I, you will discover countless advertisements for ingenious and “undetectable” prosthetic devices: hands, arms, feet, legs. Before antibiotics and microsurgery, infection was almost invariably lethal, amputation a commonplace. And as a nation we had left more than the dead behind us at the Somme, the Marne, the Argonne.
    But in the case of the man before us, one felt that for him a missing arm, particularly his own, was a thing to be noted and then totally ignored. One felt that he knew he could accomplish more with one arm than any other man might attempt with two.
    He made a small formal nod toward Miss Lizzie and then turned to Officer Medley. “Medley,” he said. “Report.”
    Unconsciously or not, Officer Medley had drawn himself up into something like a position of military attention. “The station received a notification from Miss Borden”—he indicated her with a nod—“that a murder had been committed at One Hundred Water Street and that a relation of the deceased was present at this cottage. Patrolman O’Hara and I were dispatched. I sent Officer O’Hara to investigate the murder scene while I attempted to interview young Miss Burton here, the stepdaughter of the deceased.”
    â€œAlleged deceased,” said Da Silva. “Have you viewed the murder scene?”
    â€œNo, sir. Officer O’Hara has.”
    Da Silva turned to the other policeman and frowned. It was a flicker of movement only, cold and hard but quickly gone. “O’Hara,” he said. “Your uniform is unkempt.”
    â€œSir?” said Officer O’Hara, who also stood at attention. Looking down, he spied the loose button. Sucking in his paunch, he promptly fumbled it back into place. He looked up again. “ Sir .”
    Da Silva said, “You visited the murder scene?”
    â€œYes, sir .”
    â€œReport.”
    O’Hara’s military bearing deserted him. His stomach collapsed against his shirt and he shook his head heavily. “Oh, sir, it was horrible, sir, horrible . Blood all over and bits of her scattered about, horrible , sir. Like someone had gone at her with a cleaver or”—he glanced quickly at Miss Lizzie, glanced away—“or with an axe, like. Sir.”
    Da Silva nodded. He turned to Miss Lizzie and for a moment stood appraising her. Then he smiled. His smile was as restricted and as cold as his frown. “So,” he said. “Been up to our old tricks again, have