Chapter VI

Monk was more explicit, if less reassuring.

He told me, “Doc probably thinks it a little odd IT was the third house. At the first that you got yourself in all this by chasing a place we tried, an aged butler in a nightshirt sweet voice you heard over the telephone.”

was polite to us, and at the second place two

“You saw sweet-voice, didn’t you?” I Great Dane dogs offered to eat us alive, if asked him.

one was to believe their uproar. I was about “Sure. But Doc is more babe-resistant to drop the needle on a recording of I-told-than you and me, and he probably overesti-you-so, but something restrained me—mates our strength where one like Miss Feni-probably common sense was getting a toe-song is concerned.”

hold on me.

“I don’t think I got much strength where The night was still with us, and would she’s concerned,” I said.

be for another two hours, since this was Feb-

“You better get strong,” he advised me.

ruary and the nights were long. But there was

“Because I liked her looks, and I’ll walk right a scattering of snow out here in the country over you, you get in my way.”

that made the night seem less dark. Old

“That face of yours will scare her to snow, scabs too tough for the sun to melt, death,” I said. “And if you fool with me, the now hard-frozen, crusty, shiny. The driveway face will look worse.”

where it turned off had a thin glaze of ice, He wasn’t much impressed.

and we skidded across that and up to a stone I looked at the clock as we left. Only gatehouse and a pair of iron gates formida-two hours! In two hours they had taken a ble enough for a penitentiary.

piece torn off a man’s coat and made it read Nothing more than our headlights like a book. I didn’t know much about scien-brought an old man out of the gatehouse. An tific detecting, but I was impressed.

old man who was as big as a buffalo, taller I said: “There’s one crack been made than a buffalo and nearly as wide, but as thin that I don’t get.”

and bony, and perhaps as tough, as he

“Only one?” Monk said, meaning that would be if constructed of oak sticks. He was he was thinking about Miss Fenisong and wearing an enormous black overcoat. It didn’t like me.

looked like a shroud on a dead tree. He had “Somebody said Gross went to school a voice as deep, as amiable, as a skull rolling in Vienna, Austria,” I explained. “That one I down a roof.

can’t see through.”

“Good morning,” he said. “Can I be of Savage said: “Gross attended Os-some service?”

terreich Zoologische University, or at least he Savage asked him who lived here.

had a tattoo mark in his armpit which was “The owner of the establishment, sir,”

affected by the Zoologische students during said the old giant.

the early twenties. The idea of armpit tattoo-

“Would his name be Albert Gross?”

ing, instead of a class-ring, was a general Savage asked.

practice, and preceded the Nazi practice of He buttoned the black overcoat, doing armpit tattoos to identify SS men, of which it slowly, taking time to measure us with a you may have heard. . . . Incidentally, you micrometer and do a little thinking. His hair didn’t see the armpit mark on Gross, nor was as grey as an old seagull, nearly a foot have I but the police medical examiner de-long and seemed to stick out straight from his scribed it accurately over the telephone.”

head everywhere. All he needed was a

“From Austria, huh?” I said. “That could scythe, and he could play Death.

mean something, couldn’t it?”

“This is indeed the residence of Mr. Albert Gross,” he finally admitted.

NO LIGHT TO DIE BY