Murder Has Its Points Read Online Free PDF

some poor Joe trying to get a taxi. In front of the Dumont.”
    â€œSome ways,” Foley said, “this is a hell of a town.”
    Victim: Anthony Payne, white American; 57; 5 feet 11; 195 pounds; occupation, writer. House in Ridgefield, Connecticut; for some days staying at the Hotel Dumont. Married; wife in hotel room—fourth floor, front; under mild sedation when notified by friends. Further sedation considered necessary by house physician.
    Nature of wound: Gunshot, probably .22 long rifle (autopsy to verify) in top of head. Apparent course of bullet, straight down. Unconscious almost instantly; dead in seconds; dead on the arrival of an ambulance; body removed to morgue.
    â€œThey don’t grow wings,” Pearson told Foley. “Nobody was hovering over his head.”
    â€œHe leans a little this way,” Foley pointed out. “Leans a little that way. All our joker has to do is wait until he leans where wanted.”
    Pamela North and Gerald North; Thomas Hathaway and Livingston Birdwood had waited. They had been asked to wait, as those closest to Payne when he died. And Mrs. North had been the one who had gone up to the room in which Lauren Payne dozed, under the mild influence of a barbiturate, and wakened her to tell her that Anthony Payne was dead.
    Pam had been a little surprised by the wide-eyed, protesting shock with which her news had been received. She did not know precisely why she had been surprised; she knew nothing of the relations between Lauren and her husband. Anthony might have been all her life to Lauren Payne. Why, then, be surprised at the near-hysteria that followed shock, at the need for sedation so quickly recognized by the house physician?
    They had waited in the lounge of the Dumont, with Birdwood looking often at his watch. When they arrived, Foley and Pearson looked very much like policemen in plain clothes. Pearson said it looked like being one of those things—one of those things with no sense to it.
    â€œMight have been anybody,” Foley said. “Any one of you. Got hit, I mean.”
    Pam had already thought of that, shivered at the thought of that. It might most easily have been Jerry, who had been standing closest—who had had a hand on Payne’s left arm, to steady him.
    â€œAbout all we can do,” Pearson said, “is to try to work out where the shot came from. See what I mean? It went straight in, looks like. As if whoever fired was shooting straight down. But it couldn’t have been, because what’s directly above him? Air.”
    â€œHe was—swaying a little,” Pam said. “He was—” She stopped.
    â€œPayne had had several drinks,” Jerry said. “I suppose we all had. We’d been at a cocktail party, you see. Payne showed his, when he got out in the air especially. So—”
    â€œSure,” Foley said. “He swayed a little, leaned this way a little and that way a little. Which way was he leaning when it hit him?”
    Jerry shook his head slowly and looked at Pam, and she shook hers. “I haven’t the faintest idea,” Tom Hathaway said. “I wasn’t looking at him,” Birdwood said. “I was watching the doorman trying to get a cab.”
    â€œIf it was toward this hotel,” Pearson said, “then the shot probably came from here. Or the place next door. If he was leaning toward the street, then our man could have been in the hotel across it—the—” He looked at Foley.
    â€œKing Arthur,” Foley said. “Or the hotel up the street from it. Or the roof of the parking garage.”
    â€œIt’s about all we’ve got to go on,” Pearson said. “It’s not much, is it?”
    â€œThings like this, we never get much,” Foley said. “That’s the size of it. Nobody noticed which way he was leaning? Which way he was facing?”
    Still nobody had.
    â€œI don’t suppose,” Pearson said,