Free Pale Betrayer by Dorothy Salisbury Davis Page B

“And will you tell me please what decent young girls are up to, living alone in this part of the city?”
    Marks cleared his throat. The question had been rhetorical.
    “Sit down,” she said, with a nod toward two straight-backed chairs. She tucked a strand of gray hair into the bun at the back of her head, and stood, her arms folded, measuring Marks with watery blue eyes. About to sit down, he waited then till she did.
    “It was me that found the body,” Mrs. Finney said, “but you wouldn’t see him mentioning that, would you?” She jerked her head toward Herring.
    “I’m sorry,” Herring said, “but you gave me the impression that you were trying to avoid publicity.”
    She made a small noise of righteousness. “I’m always ready to do my civic duty, but like everybody else I like to get credit for it.”
    “Understandable,” Marks murmured. “You were taking the dog out, I suppose, when first you noticed the man?”
    “As a matter of fact I was,” she said, admitting now what she had denied the night before. “It’s terrible what happens to a person living in a neighborhood like this. The poor man was trying to get up, you see, and I thought he was drunk. I just gave Dandy a pull and got away as quick as I could.”
    Marks was very much afraid that this testimony was reliable: unless there had been some movement in the prone figure, she was not likely to have assumed Bradley drunk. It opened wide the possibility of two attacks, one in the vestibule of Anne’s building, and the second on the street when he was perhaps recovering from the blow on the head. If that were the case, the motive of the first attack was not robbery. Either that, or the second attackers, taking turns, as it were, got nothing.
    “Do you know what time it was when you first saw him, Mrs. Finney?”
    “Not much past ten,” she said. “Dandy just won’t wait any longer. He’s getting old, you can see. We always stop at Molloy’s on Third Avenue for a glass of beer and to watch the television, but I didn’t last night. I was thinking about that man, you see, in the back of my mind though I never knew it at the time myself. I got as far as Molloy’s and turned back without going in.”
    Marks leaned forward, inviting her confidence. “You didn’t tell anybody about him on the way, did you?”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Well, you’ve just said you were thinking about him, a little concerned perhaps that he might be hurt?”
    She thought about that, calculating the best light in which to put herself, and then shook her head. “I thought if he was still there I might call the police when I got home.”
    “Of course you would,” Marks said. “Now you and Dandy walked along Tenth Street to Third Avenue. There you would have turned north, going to Molloy’s.”
    “Do you know Molloy’s?” she said, her face cracking into its first smile. You’d have thought she had discovered a long lost relative. “It’s a funny old place, but it feels like home.”
    Marks nodded. “Before you reached Third Avenue, did you meet anyone?”
    “I didn’t, you see, or I’d have stopped worrying.”
    Marks thought: witnesses always lied even when they thought they were telling the truth.
    “I remember a gang of boys when I reached Third Avenue. But I don’t know where they went. I’m scared of the gangs, I’ll tell you.”
    “Is there anything you remember about them?”
    “Well … they weren’t …” She gestured vaguely and gave a flit of her eyelashes toward Herring.
    “Black?” he prompted.
    “Colored,” she corrected him in a slightly reproachful tone.
    “They were or they were not?” Marks said.
    “They were not. I heard them laughing and talking. Some of them were shouting something like, ‘oleh!’ Spanish, I thought, but I didn’t see any of them close, just a sea of faces in the night.”
    “One last question,” Marks said: “As you passed the entrance to the building near which the man was lying, did