Not Quite Dead Enough (The Rex Stout Library)

I should have smiled at her, but she just wasn’t anything to smile at. So I looked her in the eye and said, “Miss Leeds, you want facts. Okay, here’s three facts. One. This is the first I ever heard of hawks. Two. This is the first I ever heard of your mother. Three. I came here to see Ann Amory, and Leon tells me she’s up on the roof.” I stood up. “If I see any hawks up there, I’ll catch ‘em alive and wring their necks. And I’ll tell the mayor what you said.”

I walked out to the hall and along that to the next flight of stairs.

Chapter 5

The hall above and the one above that were each lit by a single unshaded bulb in a wall socket, but when I opened the door at the stairs to the roof, and passed through and closed it behind me, I was in darkness. I felt my way up with my feet on the wooden treads, found a latch at the top and opened a door, and was on the roof. Blinking at flakes of snow the wind was tossing around, and seeing nothing anywhere that might have been called Ann Amory, I headed for what looked like a penthouse to my left. Light was showing at the edges of a shaded window, and when I got to the door I could make out a sign painted on it:

RACING PIGEON LOFT

ROY DOUGLAS

KEEP OUT!

Since it said keep out, naturally my impulse was to go on in, but I restrained it and knocked. A man’s voice came asking who it was, and I called that it was company for Miss Amory, and the door swung open.

That house seemed to be inhabited exclusively by conclusion-jumpers. Without giving me a chance to introduce myself the young man who had opened the door, and closed it again after I entered, began telling me that he couldn’t possibly spare any more for at least four months, that he was willing and eager to do anything he could to help win the war but he had already sent me 40 birds and had to keep his stock for breeding, and he didn’t see why the Army didn’t understand.

Meanwhile I was surveying. Boxes and bags were stacked around, and shelves were cluttered with various kinds of items that I had never seen before. A door in the far wall had a sign on it: Do Not Open. A wire cage, more like a coop, with a pigeon in it, was on a table, and on a chair by the table was a girl. She was looking up at me with wide-open brown eyes. As for the young man, he wasn’t in Leon Furey’s class as a physical specimen, and they had short-changed him a little on his chin, but he would pass. I stopped him in the middle of his speech.