The Black Door by Collin Wilcox Read Free Book Online Page A

you hit two hundred fifty pounds yet?” Campion inquired.
    Kanter paid no attention, wasting neither words nor energy. Neither was he wasting the opportunity for self-indulgence.
    “Reporters have to be lean and wiry, you know,” Campion continued. He waved at me across the table. “Look at Steve—the new breed. A hundred sixty, I’d say. A lean, eager thirty years old.”
    “Thirty-one,” I corrected. “And a hundred sixty-five.”
    “My ambition,” Kanter finally announced, “is to sit in the office and pound the typewriter. Chasing news with the feet is outdated, silly, and inefficient. There should be the newsgatherers and the newswriters, and they should communicate with walkie-talkies.” He waved a resentful hand in the general direction of Pastor’s apartment, a block and a half away. “Take this situation. It’s ten forty-five now. I’ve got a twelve-thirty deadline. So all I’ve done, really, is to waste my time coming out here. I could’ve got everything I wanted on the phone, plus sending a leg man to the scene, plus digging out some biographical stuff on Grinnel. That’s the real meat in this—old man Grinnel.”
    “Why don’t you join a morning paper?” Campion pointed a finger at me. “His, for instance.”
    Kanter grunted, chewing and swallowing.
    “Why do you say ‘old man Grinnel’?” I asked. “I heard him speak once on TV, and I don’t think he’s more than fifty.”
    Kanter gulped a final mouthful of the Danish before answering. “He’s closer to sixty, I think.”
    “What’s the name of his movement?” Campion asked. “I forget.”
    “It’s the F.F.F.,” I answered. “Forward For Freedom.”
    “There must be an obscene variation on that.”
    “The whole thing is obscene,” Kanter said. “It’d be an obscenity mocking an obscenity. Redundant.”
    “I wonder how those two got themselves killed?” Campion mused. “And especially I wonder about Pastor. It looked like his neck was broken.”
    “I wonder about the noise,” Kanter said.
    “The noise?”
    “Yeah, a double murder in an apartment house. Someone must’ve heard it.”
    “That’s a pretty isolated apartment, though,” I offered. “As my photographer said, it’s really a basement apartment.”
    “Still, there’s someone upstairs,” Campion said.
    “Are you sure?”
    “Well, I—”
    “I checked the mailboxes,” Kanter put in. “It looks like the apartment above his is empty. The windows, too. They have that look. But, still, it seems that—”
    “I wonder about the brother,” I said suddenly.
    Kanter regarded me with thoughtful eyes. “The brother?”
    Immediately, I regretted saying it. And, at that moment, Caselli came into the lunchroom, followed by Campion’s photographer.
    “Ah,” said Caselli, attempting to disguise his resentment with banter. “They sit, we sweat.”
    “Right,” Campion answered cheerfully, kicking out a chair. “If you guys could learn to work a typewriter instead of a flash gun you, too, could live the good, simple life.”
    “Yeah,” Kanter muttered, draining the last of his coffee and rising ponderously to his feet. “Yeah, forward for freedom. Well, see you at the news conference at Bransten, with luck.” He moved toward the door. “Be sure and buy a copy of the Dispatch this afternoon. Save yourselves some digging.”
    Campion made a derisive noise, and I decided to order a Danish.
    I made the Danish do for lunch, and by eleven-thirty I’d arrived at the Bransten campus, where I planned to stay until the dean’s news conference, at two o’clock. I would then go down to headquarters for Larsen’s news conference, and then to the paper, where I would theoretically be supplied with a biographical sketch of Grinnel for use in my story. With luck, I expected to finish the story by nine in the evening, a twelve-hour day. Really thirteen, I decided, since I’d made the Danish do for lunch.
    I’d lived for most of my life in San Francisco, yet