One Minute Past Eight Read Online Free PDF

police.
     
    The manager arrived first, but the two uniformed policemen from a radio car were not far behind, and since they spoke nothing but Spanish there was little Jeff could do but stand beside Karen Holmes and listen.
    After the first outburst one of the officers went to the telephone and dialed. He spoke rapidly for ten seconds and hung up. His partner bent over the body and experimented with the limp hand and wrist and carefully replaced it. By now the man at the telephone had seen the revolver, but he did not touch it. He stood with his back to it, his partner joined him, and they waited silently, eyes fixed on Jeff and the girl, grim-faced but very neat in their khaki uniforms with the Sam Browne belts and crisscrossed straps and heavy holstered guns at their hips.
    The manager, whose name was Andrews, was a chubby, florid-faced man with thin colorless hair and an apoplectic manner. It was clear that he blamed Jeff and/or Karen Holmes for what had happened and his tone of voice suggested he would sue them both for defamation of the hotel’s reputation at the earliest possible moment.
    “You say you found him?” he said. “Which one of you?”
    “Both of us,” Jeff said.
    “But how? Why should you be here in this room at all? When did you check in, Mr. Lane?”
    Jeff told him, and then because he was tired of Andrews he said: “Look. When the detectives get here—if that’s what they have in Caracas, and assuming that one of them can speak English—we’ll tell what we know but there’s no point in telling it twice. If you want to wait you can listen in.”
    Andrews sputtered and had a little trouble with his breath but he did not suffer long because the door opened a few seconds later and two men came in, one of them big and young looking, the other one older and thinner. At the sight of the big man the two uniformed men stiffened to attention while he spoke briefly to them. They replied and one pointed to the gun. When they had touched their caps, they detoured along the wall and left the room.
    The big man took off his light-gray felt and put it on the bed. He had a light-complexioned, strong-boned face and black eyes that had a hooded look beneath the heavy brows. The eyes were busy in the few seconds as they inspected the dead man without moving closer and then considered Jeff, the girl, and finally Andrews.
    When he was ready he spoke to Andrews. There was a brief exchange while the florid face grew more so. Finally Andrews shrugged and left the room. When the door closed the man turned back to Jeff.
    “I told Mr. Andrews that we would send for him when we needed him,” he said, with only a trace of accent. “I am Ramon Zumeta, chief of our Homicide Section.”
    “Jeffrey Lane,” Jeff said. “This is Miss Karen Holmes.”
    “And this one?” Zumeta glanced toward the floor.
    “His name was Harry Baker,” Jeff said. “A private detective from the States.”
    “Ah—you knew him?”
    “He was working for me.”
    Zumeta nodded and spoke in Spanish to his companion, who had been emptying Baker’s pockets and now stopped to pick up a small straight-backed chair and carry it to the far side of the bed by the window. When he motioned the girl to sit down she thanked him and Zumeta said:
    “Who found him?”
    “I did,” Karen said, and repeated the story she had told Jeff but with somewhat more detail.
    “And you, Mr. Lane?”
    Jeff started with his arrival at the airport and told what he knew. There was no interruption. Zumeta would nod from time to time but only the intense steadiness of his gaze suggested that he had filed, catalogued and cross-indexed everything he had heard. Now he went over to the desk and looked at the revolver.
    “You found this on the floor, Miss Holmes. You picked it up without thinking and took it into the closet? And you took it away from her, Mr. Lane?” He shrugged and picked it up. “Then if there were any worth-while fingerprints on it—which is