Free The Philadelphia Murder Story by Leslie Ford Page A

I said.
    He paid his bill and got up. “I think you’d better come over to the Post with me. Unless you have some reason for not wanting to.”
    “Don’t be silly,” I said. “I’d love to.”
    That wasn’t true, of course; I didn’t want to go at all, and I wish now I hadn’t.
    It was the first time I’d ever been there. The taxi went skidding down Spruce Street. It was almost two o’clock. The gray brick between the car tracks was a shimmering gun-metal ribbon down the center of the old street, with its line of leafless sycamores on either side and its mellow, lovely old houses. We turned into Washington Square, across Walnut into 7th Street and to the right, weaving a perilous way through the enormous trucks unloading prodigious rolls of paper in the narrow alley of Sansom Street alongside the Curtis Building. Independence Square was just ahead of us, and the old State House, the cradle of liberty, where the bell is that rang out to all mankind, was on our left as we turned—so beautiful, and with so much dignity and meaning in its time-stained brick and slender, gleaming cupola, that I never see it without a sudden quickening of my heart. Men and women in uniform hurrying by gave it a sharpened meaning just then and as we turned right into 6th Street in front of the Curtis Building, the sun caught the great service flag hanging in front of the weather-stained double columns of the facade. The number “947” was on the single blue star in its radiant white red-bordered field.
    We got out and went up the steps. It didn’t at once seem strange to me that a policeman was standing behind the long plate-glass window at the left of the door or that Sgt. Phineas T. Buck’s large, square and granite form was standing there with him. I’ve seen both Sergeant Buck and policemen in unexpected places everywhere. But Colonel Primrose, I thought, quickened his pace and pushed open the heavy bronze-trimmed door a little hastily. We stepped into the vestibule, and Colonel Primrose opened the plate-glass door at the left.
    I knew, when we went in, that something was wrong, knew it the instant Sergeant Buck stepped forward, even before I saw the group of people there in the lobby. I’d seen groups of people look like that before, and heard the same sort of voice say, “Get back there, everybody. Get ’em back. Get ’em out of the way.”
    They were across the lobby in front of a raised terrace between square marble columns. Behind the terrace was the great glass mosaic, lustrous, softly glowing, the purple shadows creeping up among opalescent flowers around the brilliant waterfall at the base of a mountain to the glorious glow of the sunset and the dark mystery of gnarled and romantic trees. Then the soft musical trickle of water stopped abruptly. Someone was moving the ornamental shrubs around the front and side of the terrace. I saw a great terracotta oil jar, like Ali Baba’s, being pushed away, and heard the voice again, “Get back. Get ’em back… Here, doctor.”
    There was a movement in the tightly packed group. They parted to let a white-coated man through. I saw him then. He was lying, his face wet, at the side of a shallow, oblong pool. His black hair was clinging to his pallid face, and there were bits of green pond scum matted on it like grotesque vine leaves of the grave. It was Myron Kane, and he was quite dead.
    “I guess he fainted and drowned,” someone said.
    I knew that wasn’t so. Myron Kane had never for an instant fainted and drowned, not in the soft glow of the alabaster lights in front of the opalescent and green-and-gold mural—not anywhere. Myron’s hold on life had been too ruthless and too canny to let it go so easily.
    There was a sudden commotion at the side of the pool. A man thrust his hand into it and brought it up again.
    “Don’t look like he fainted to me,” he said.
    He was holding up a knife. It looked like a butcher knife from some kitchen of cutthroats, sharp-pointed