The Main Death and This King Business Read Online Free PDF

over her shoulder as she left us.
    Bruno Gungen looked at me and giggled.
    I sat down again and asked him what he knew about Jeffrey Main.
    â€œEverything, no less,” he assured me. “For a dozen years, since he was a boy of eighteen he has been my right eye, my right hand.”
    â€œWell, what sort of man was he?”
    Bruno Gungen showed me his pink palms side by side.
    â€œWhat sort is any man?” he asked over them.
    That didn’t mean anything to me, so I kept quiet, waiting.
    â€œI shall tell you,” the little man began presently. “Jeffrey had the eye and the taste for this traffic of mine. No man living save myself alone has a judgment in these matters which I would prefer to Jeffrey’s. And, honest, mind you! Let nothing I say mislead you on that point. Never a lock have I to which Jeffrey had not also the key, and might have it forever, if he had lived so long.
    â€œBut there is a but. In his private life, rascal is a word that only does him justice. He drank, he gambled, he loved, he spent—dear God, how he spent! He was, in this drinking and gaming and loving and spending, a most promiscuous fellow, beyond doubt. With moderation he had nothing to do. Of the moneys he got by inheritance, of the fifty thousand dollars or more his wife had when they were married, there is no remainder. Fortunately, he was well insured—else his wife would have been left penniless. Oh, he was a true Heliogabalus, that fellow!”
    Bruno Gungen went down to the front door with me when I left. I said, “Good night,” and walked down the gravel path to where I had left my car. The night was clear, dark, moonless. High hedges were black walls on both sides of the Gungen place. To the left there was a barely noticeable hole in the blackness—a dark-gray hole—oval—the size of a face.
    I got into my car, stirred up the engine and drove away. Into the first cross-street I turned, parked the machine, and started back toward Gungen’s afoot. I was curious about that face-size oval.
    When I reached the corner, I saw a woman coming toward me from the direction of Gungen’s. I was in the shadow of a wall. Cautiously, I backed away from the corner until I came to a gate with brick buttresses sticking out. I made myself flat between them.
    The woman crossed the street, went on up the driveway, toward the car line. I couldn’t make out anything about her, except that she was a woman. Maybe she was coming from Gungen’s grounds, maybe not. Maybe it was her face I had seen against the hedge, maybe not. It was a heads or tails proposition. I guessed yes and tailed her up the drive.
    Her destination was a drugstore on the car line. Her business there was with the telephone. She spent ten minutes at it. I didn’t go into the store to try for an earful, but stayed on the other side of the street, contenting myself with a good look at her.
    She was a girl of about twenty-five, medium in height, chunky in build, with pale gray eyes that had little pouches under them, a thick nose and a prominent lower lip. She had no hat over her brown hair. Her body was wrapped in a long blue cape.
    From the drug store I shadowed her back to the Gungen house. She went in the back door. A servant, probably, but not the maid who had opened the door for me earlier in the evening.
    I returned to my car, drove back to town, to the office.
    â€œIs Dick Foley working on anything?” I asked Fiske, who sits on the Continental Detective Agency’s affairs at night.
    â€œNo. Did you ever hear the story about the fellow who had his neck operated on?”
    With the slightest encouragement, Fiske is good for a dozen stories without a stop, so I said:
    â€œYes. Get hold of Dick and tell him I’ve got a shadow job out Westwood Park way for him to start on in the morning.”
    I gave Fiske—to be passed on to Dick—Gungen’s address and a description of the girl who had