again, with distress on his vast moonface.
“Say—it does sound as if it’s busted,” he admitted, chewing his lip.
“Sure,” said Nellie. “Just another of your thumb-handed jobs—”
“But maybe it’s something else,” Smitty interrupted, sore again. “The trouble could be on the other end of the line. Did you trace the call?”
“What for?” shrugged Nellie maliciously. “Your precious dingbat didn’t work, so—”
“Somebody calls here—probably in trouble—and you didn’t trace the call right away?” It was Smitty’s turn to jeer. “What a swell stunt that is!” He was getting the telephone operator as he berated her. “You can’t tell what that call might have meant. It might be that a life was lost because you didn’t trace it,” he went on. “Why, before I’d do a thing like that—”
He got his information then.
“That was a Thornton Heights number,” the operator said. They moved fast when Justice, Inc. called. “It was Thornton Heights 9-2243.”
Smitty muttered, “Sounds like that Scotman, Fergus MacMurdie, burring into the phone.”
The operator went on, “That number is out of order.”
Smitty whirled to Nellie, who was looking a bit crestfallen.
“See?” he exulted. “It was the phone, and not—”
The buzzer sounded, and a tiny red light showed that it was the street-door buzzer. Smitty went to a small black box on a huge desk.
The black box, its top screened, was his, too. It was, in effect, a little television radio that constantly showed the vestibule downstairs—and anyone in it.
Smitty saw a girl in the small screen.
“Oh, boy! Something!” he said. And Nellie’s pretty blue eyes began to get small green lights in them. She was really pretty crazy about the oversized guy, and he could always get her goat by pretending more interest in other girls than he really felt.
“Some designing little female, I suppose?” she snapped, reading Smitty’s tone correctly.
“I’ll bet she’s not designing,” Smitty said, pressing the button that opened the door downstairs. “Poor little thing! She looks as if she needs help.”
“To you, any female under sixty that isn’t in a side show,” said Nellie, “is a ‘poor little thing that needs help.’ You are a sucker, my over-grown friend.”
The girl came into the huge room, and Nellie’s look, and tone, changed at once. For Nellie had a warm and generous heart and plenty of sympathy for those in trouble.
This girl looked troubled, all right. She was very pale and was so agitated that her nose wasn’t even powdered. A very extreme case, Nellie knew.
Then, after the girl gave her name, Nellie knew there was something distinctly interesting here.
“I’m Myra Horton,” the girl said. “I want to see Mr. Benson as soon as possible. I want to tell him about a murder—a dreadful thing—in Thornton Heights.”
Thornton Heights! Smitty and Nellie stared at each other. It was a Thornton Heights number that had tried, about an hour ago, to contact Justice, Inc. A number now “out of order.”
“What about this murder? And why is it so dreadful?” said Nellie. She added: “We’re associates of Mr. Benson’s. You can talk to us.”
“It’s the murder of a man named Timothy Phelan,” said this tall, pretty girl, who had come in out of the night. “He was assistant engineer of the Thornton Heights development. He was killed by something, something that—” She shivered. “I just saw up to his knee. It looked as if he’d been run through a corn cutter.”
Smitty’s ingenuous-looking blue eyes were narrowed and still. Very still and very intent.
“Thornton Heights,” he said. “Murder. And the body is badly mangled. There was a man named Carl Foley killed out in Thornton Heights a few days ago, wasn’t there?”
“Yes,” said Myra Horton. “He was one of the officers of the corporation that owns the property.”
“And wasn’t his body badly treated, too?”
“Yes. He