Free The Philadelphia Murder Story by Leslie Ford Page B

as a poniard, razor-edged. The handle was wrapped in some faintly gleaming gunmetal-gray material.
    A tall, stoop-shouldered man spoke.
    “That’s a cutting-down knife,” he said. “From Electrotyping, on the ninth floor.”
    A quiet, fatherly-looking man in a dark gray suit walked over toward him. He could have been a member of the Rotary Club in good standing, a lawyer or an executive of The Curtis Publishing Company—anything except what I soon learned he was—the captain of the Philadelphia homicide squad.
    Colonel Primrose went over, too, and spoke to him.
    “I know this man,” he said. He nodded toward the tall, stoop-shouldered man. “This is Erd Brandt. He was a colonel in the Seventh Regiment. He’s one of the editors here.”
    “Yes?” the fatherly-looking man said. “He looks to me like a Number One suspect. How does an editor know what kind of a knife it is and where it comes from? I suppose Benjamin Franklin had it in his pocket.”
    Colonel Primrose looked at him. “Benjamin-—”
    “That’s the story.” He jerked a finger at a man sitting white-faced behind the marble desk at the side of the lobby near the elevator. “He’s been sitting there since one o’clock. He says the last person he saw in here was Benjamin Franklin. My name’s Francis X. Malone, and I’m captain of the homicide squad, and I’m Irish, and I’ve seen a lot of fairies, but Benjamin Franklin’s dead. Maybe he founded this magazine, but he’s still dead.”
    I had the grotesque thought that if it was Benjamin Franklin, it wasn’t Monk, it wasn’t anybody in Rittenhouse Square.
    Captain Malone beckoned. The man at the desk got up and came over. He was white-faced and his knees were not steady, but he was in deadly earnest.
    “I’m not kidding, captain,” he said. “I saw him. I tell you I saw him with my own eyes. I mean, I know him. Look. I look at him all day.” He pointed to the white marble bust of the great gazetteer looking placidly down from his pedestal. “He walked right across here. I saw him. He had on white stockings and a brown coat and short pants with buckles at the knees. I’m not crazy. I tell you I saw him twice.”
    A tall young man with blue eyes and glasses, quiet, calm and unhurried, had come over to the table in front of the pool terrace where we were.
    “I tell you, Mr. Hibbs, I saw him—I saw Benjamin Franklin,” the man from the desk said. And I had no possible doubt of the conviction of truth in his own mind. “I just tell you I saw him,” he added patiently.
    “All right, you saw him,” Captain Malone said. “Just take it easy.” He turned to Ben Hibbs. “Did all the members of your staff know this man Kane, Mr. Hibbs?”
    Ben Hibbs nodded. “Yes. We all knew him.”
    “Did you like him?”
    There was a little hesitation, not long, but a little too long. “Yes. Well enough.” His blue eyes were slightly troubled as they moved over the group of men, some of them in shirt sleeves, some not, who had moved away from the terrace and the goldfish pool. He looked like a shepherd counting his flock.
    Captain Malone watched him with a fatherly interest.
    “Not all present, Mr. Hibbs?”
    “No.”
    I looked quickly at Colonel Primrose. It seems incredible that I felt my heart glow a little. Not that I wanted anyone on The Saturday Evening Post to hang for the murder of Myron Kane, exactly. It was just that-I was aware suddenly that the benevolent man in the dark gray suit was looking at me intently.
    “I don’t think you’ve met Captain Malone, have you, Mrs. Latham?” Colonel Primrose said.
    I’d realized already that I’d made a mistake. But he couldn’t connect the Whitneys with it, possibly. I hadn’t said anything.
    Just then somebody spoke up abruptly, “What’s this?”
    It was one of Captain Malone’s detectives. They’d moved Myron Kane’s body away from the pool. The man was holding up a small yellow oblong slip of paper.
    And another man spoke.