Free The King of Ragtime by Larry Karp

not a trace of blood on him. Lottie motioned the men to the fire escape. “Best nobody sees us goin’ out the front door.” They all scrambled onto the platform, then Lottie pulled the window shut behind them and led her charges down the ladder to the alley below.
    ***
    Nell Stanley turned a very hard eye onto the trio as they scampered into her apartment, then ushered them through the little vestibule and into the living room. Joplin and Martin sat on the sofa, while Lottie lowered herself into a straight-backed chair. Nell pointed at an overstuffed armchair. “Wouldn’t you be more comfortable there?”
    One side of Lottie’s mouth curled upward. “Prob’ly so. But sometimes it ain’t the best idea for a person to get too comfortable.”
    Nell nodded. She picked up a wooden tray from the table in front of the sofa, gave each of her guests a glass of iced tea, then settled into the armchair.
    Lottie spoke first. “Thanks for lettin’ us come by here, Nell. Martin did right, bringin’ Scott home, but I knew he couldn’t stay there. Anybody wants to go lookin’ for him, that’s the first stop they gonna make.”
    “That and
my
family’s apartment,” said Martin, then squirmed as Nell turned her gaze onto him.
    “Tell her, boy,” Lottie said. “Tell the lady what-all happened.”
    Nell leaned forward to take in Martin’s every word. When he finished his story, she said, “Well, I’m sure the police
would
have looked on the two of you with a good deal of suspicion. But now, when they catch up with you, they’re going to be even more suspicious. Particularly of you, Martin—it was your office and your friend. What were you and…what was his name?”
    “Sid. Sid Altman.”
    “Fine. What were you and Sid doing there after hours, anyway?”
    “Putting in overtime.”
    Nell started to tell the young man this was no time to crack wise, but he wasn’t through talking. “I spent most of yesterday going through some numbers for Mr. Tabor, he’s the office manager. They proved one of the partners, Mr. Waterson, is skimming profits. It’s no secret he plays the horses, so maybe he needs to pay off some losses. But that made me fall behind on this month’s sales figures, and Mr. Tabor said I had to get them caught up tonight. Sid usually comes by on his way home from work, and we go the rest of the way together—us and Birdie, my girlfriend, she works at W, B, and S too. But her old man makes a fuss when she’s late getting home, so she left on time, and Sid waited for me.”
    “And you went to the bathroom, came back, and found Mr. Joplin there holding…” Nell looked at the razor Martin had set on the piano bench next to Stark. “I don’t see anything unusual there—no initials, no carvings. Just a plain black razor.”
    “Mine’s back home—I can show you. In the bathroom, where it belongs.”
    The first words out of Joplin. Nell had thought he wasn’t paying the least attention, that his mind was off somewhere, trying to put together a line of music. She waved off his concern. “No need, Scott. I wouldn’t believe for a minute that you killed that young man.”
    Martin wondered whether there was anything to the fact that Nell didn’t say, ‘either of you’.
    “Well, of course not, of course I didn’t.” Joplin spat words like bullets from a machine-gun, punctuating them with jabs of a shaking index finger. “I went down there because Irving Berlin called me. I think he wants to publish
If
. I should have stayed there and found him. I should not have let Martin take me away.”
    Nell felt pity mixed with annoyance. Joplin, all his life such a reserved, dignified man, was operating at the level of a child, and not a very bright child at that. She felt a fury at the disease that was turning that marvelous brain into mush, then told herself she was being as irrational as Joplin. The situation was as it was, and her job was simply to do what she could to help. As if from a distance away,