The Case of the Petrified Man Read Online Free PDF Page B

Nothing can change it. If you want some gruesome deaths,” he added, “why don’t you waltz on down to the Coroner’s office?”
    “I just might do that,” replied Sam Clemens. His eyes were narrowed and he was blowing his pipe smoke down. From that I knew he was riled.
    Doc Pinkerton stood up. “This man may live if he gets immediate treatment,” he said. “Somebody help me take him inside.”
    Four men stepped forward and each took an arm or a leg.
    “Outch! Outch! Outch!” cried the wounded man as they heaved him aloft.
    The four men started to take him into the Shamrock Saloon, which had recently opened across the street from my office.
    But a burly man on the boardwalk barred their way. He wore an apron around his waist and Expression No. 5 on his face. “Don’t you even think of bringing Murphy in here,” he said in an Irish accent. “I won’t have him bleeding all over my brand new floor.”
    “Where, then?” said Doc Pinkerton. “I must get him out of the thoroughfare.”
    “I say, bring him in here!” said an English-accented voice. “I have a couch.”
    We all looked up to see my neighbor Isaiah Coffin standing in the open door of the Ambrotype & Photographic Gallery next door to my shop. He was hatless & smoking his meerschaum pipe. I realized that he was also
tall & slim & blond with a billy goat beard!
    Then I looked around the crowd and saw two other men who fit Martha’s description of Short Sally’s killer.
    I thought, “Finding Short Sally’s Killer is not going to be as easy as I expected.”
    Then I thought, “I had better ask Martha what he was wearing.”
    And finally, “But first I have to get that starving girl some food.”
    I headed towards the Colombo Restaurant, walking behind the four men carrying Murphy. They were going the same direction as me anyway.
    “Outch! Outch! Outch!” cried Murphy as his friends stepped up onto the boardwalk and carried him into Isaiah Coffin’s Photographic Gallery.
    I lingered for a moment outside the open door, then remembered my mission and hurried on to the Colombo Restaurant. All the customers had come out to see what the shooting was about. Now they were shuffling back inside. Some of them still had napkins tucked into their collars or newspapers under their arms.
    Gus, the Mexican waiter, gave me a plate of beans & bacon & still-warm biscuits that a customer had left withouttouching because the sight of oozing bullet holes had destroyed his appetite. Gus did not even charge me.
    Before I went into my office, I peeped through the open doorway of Isaiah Coffin’s Photographic Gallery.
    They had put Murphy on a buffalo skin on the couch. Doc Pinkerton was sitting on a chair & bent over him. I could see the four friends & Isaiah Coffin & his Chinese assistant, Ping. I wanted to watch, too, but I had a client to attend to.
    My first client.
    A poor starving girl who was being hunted by a cold-blooded killer because she was an Eye Witness to murder.
    But when I unlocked the door of my office and went inside, I made a distressing discovery.
    My first Genuine Client had disappeared.

Ledger Sheet 10
    THE FRONT OF MY OFFICE opens out onto a boardwalk and street like a normal building in a normal town.
    But Virginia is not a normal town. It is built on such a steep mountain that the fronts of the mountain-facing houses are level with the street they face, but many of their backs are often propped up on stilts. Mine was one of those west-facing buildings, with its backside dangling over thin air.
    My office is also peculiar in that it has no rear entrance. In the back room there is only a sashwindow overlooking the roofs of the buildings on the west side of C Street and that two-story drop between.
    When I went back to my bedchamber to search for Martha, I was astounded to see the lower half of the window was wide-open. Had Martha jumped onto the roof of the Washoe Exchange Billiard Saloon? There was a gap of about a yard and a half between