Murder Has Its Points Read Online Free PDF Page A

twitched violently, and more or less straightened out and lay still.
    â€œPoor bloke’s passed—” Hathaway began, and did not finish. Jerry was sitting on his heels by Payne and looked up at Hathaway and shook his head, and then Hathaway squatted on the other side of Payne and looked and said, “Good God!” and then put his head back and began to look, apparently, up at the sky.
    There was blood by that time. It came out of a small, neat hole almost in the middle of the top of Payne’s bald head.
    It was the doorman who ran, heavily, to call the police.
    Every now and then in New York somebody comes into the possession of a rifle and goes either to a roof or to a high-up window and indulges in target practice, with people as targets. There is no rational explanation of this; many things happen in New York, and in other cities, which do not admit of rational explanation. The police of New York are, to this, resigned. “Town’s full of crackpots,” any policeman will tell anyone. There is nothing to do about crackpots except to try to catch them.
    And this, of course, is made the more difficult by the fact that reason does not anywhere enter in. Premeditated crimes, including murder, are reasonably designed, and hence may be considered by the rational mind. In professional crime there is always the hope, usually justified, that a squeal will sound, particularly if pressure is properly applied in likely places, most of which the police know. Police laboratories sift the logic of fact and present the sittings for addition. (“The cord with which the woman was tied up is of a type used by upholsterers. This particular sample was manufactured by the Such and Such Company, which has sales outlets in—”)
    But none of these methods of operation is of much use when somebody has shot somebody else merely for the fun of it.
    During the November on a late evening of which Anthony Payne had dropped dead on the sidewalk in front of the Dumont Hotel, there had been seven snipings in the five boroughs, four of them in Manhattan. Three of these had occurred earlier in the week Payne died in. One child had been slightly grazed; a young woman had been shot in the leg, again not seriously; an elderly man had been barely nicked, but he had died of a heart attack in the moment of his shocked surprise.
    The Eighteenth Precinct, with a station house in West Fifty-fourth Street, had had its fill of snipings. Nobody had so far been caught and it did not seem likely that anybody would be. Such prankish marksmen are, in the ordinary run of things, caught either at once or not at all. (Somebody sees a rifle sticking from a window and then there is a place to start; a building to surround, to go over inch by inch.)
    In none of that month’s incidents had the police had luck. One man or woman, or boy or girl, might be responsible for Manhattan’s four and, for that matter, for the one in the Bronx and the two in Brooklyn. This was not likely, nor, on the other hand, was it likely that the sudden sequence of such shootings was merely a matter of chance. Crackpots ape crackpots. “Might be fun to try that,” one crackpot thinks, reading of another crackpot’s exploit.
    â€œGot another one,” Detective Pearson said to Detective Foley in the squad room of the Eighteenth Precinct. “We’re to get cracking, Joe. A D.O.A. this time.”
    â€œNobody will have seen anything,” Detective Foley said. “Also, everybody will have scrammed. If anybody heard anything, he thought it was a backfire.”
    â€œYep,” Detective Pearson said. “Let’s get cracking, Joe.”
    â€œThe homicide boys?”
    â€œProbably not fancy enough for them,” Detective Pearson said. “Just some poor bloke with a hole in his head, on account of this prankster sees a likely head.”
    â€œAnybody we know?”
    â€œNot a regular,” Pearson said. “Just