told me I wouldn’t be plunking my derrière on its polished surface. On the far side of it, a thirtyish man with dark wavy hair looked up from a pile of telegrams, presumably of condolence. As his baby-blue eyes registered my presence, he passed his hand over the lower part of his face in a reflexive gesture of pain, then rose with a quite creditable smile of welcome.
“Morris Watt,” he said, coming round the desk and shaking my hand. “And you’ll be Detective Sergeant Shenstone. Please sit down.”
The armchair indicated was comfortable, but of the sort you’d find at the head of a dining room table. I was green enough in the ways of plutocrats to be expecting something plusher, more like the bloated bum rests of a hotel lounge or C.P.R. parlour car. While settling in, I noticed in a yellow metal frame on a side wall a recent studio photograph of Morris’s late father; he was smiling slightly but already in life somewhat sepulchral on account of the almost bald head and the dark skin under dark, deep-set eyes. I suspected that even a picture of Digby taken at Morris’s current age would show the son to be the handsomer of the two. The planes of Morris’s face came together in the way sculptors seemed to find congenial when portraying an idealized volunteer to adorn a war memorial. The vertical depression running from his nose to the middle of his upper lip was particularly pronounced in a way that suggested seriousness of character.
“How can I help you, Mr. Shenstone?” Morris had pushed his own chair back from his interrupted reading and was now sitting with his hands folded on his crossed legs. He looked neither nervous nor, despite his prompt, impatient. I was having some difficulty hearing in my mind’s ear the distraught ejaculations Ivan MacAllister had reported.
“Was it your father’s custom to work late here at the office?”
“Yes. Much more so since my mother’s death. That was two years ago now.”
“And did you usually stay and work with him?”
“Not every night. He was aware that, unlike him, I had a wife waiting up for me. But I was always with him when he intended to stay past eleven p.m. Then he felt it would be too late to ask Curtis to pick him up.”
“His chauffeur?”
“Oh, yes. Excuse me.”
“He never drove himself?”
“He didn’t drive, no.” Morris smiled. “Though Curtis did offer to teach him.”
“So on the nights when he was staying past eleven, where did you park the car?”
“Braddock’s Garage on Pearl Street. Do you know it?”
“Just west of York.” I remembered a one-storey building accommodating an automobile livery and repair service. Parking by the day or the month was available on the flat roof. “The car was out of doors then?”
“Yes, but at least it was off the street.”
“The traffic police approve of that,” I assured him. “On the nights the car was parked at Braddock’s, Mr. Watt, did your father usually accompany you from the office to the garage when it was time to go home?”
“If he had, none of this would have happened!” Morris exclaimed peevishly.
Now it starts, I thought. This crying over spilt milk was presumably what Ivan had heard a lot of the night before.
“You can’t be sure of that, sir,” I said. “In any case, it was your father’s practice to wait on the sidewalk while you got the car. Correct?”
“In winter or if it was raining, he might wait inside the foyer till he saw me pull up. But in clement weather—”
“He waited outside,” I supplied. “How long did it take you from the moment you left him till the moment you returned with the car?”
“Never longer than five minutes. I can answer that with certainty because I often timed myself. Five minutes was the maximum until last night. Then last night the car . . . What a nightmare!”
“The car wouldn’t start?”
“It started all right, but before I got it down the ramp and out onto the street, at the first turn in fact, the steering gear failed. I knew right away that it would take some time to repair and that I had no hope of finding a mechanic between two and three in the morning. The thing to do was to call a cab and get my father home. So I made for a public telephone.”
“There was no one downstairs in the garage, no night watchman?”
“No. The only security at night is provided by a padlocked chain across the ramp. People who rent parking space by the month are given a key.”
“Which phone did you use, the one at Adelaide and Sheppard?”
“I knew the closest booth was just south of the garage, on King, so that’s where I went, even though it took me farther afield. That was wrong. I should have gone back and told my father first. Then maybe . . .”
“You might only have got yourself shot too, sir. Did you in fact call a cab?”
“Yes, to meet me at 96 Adelaide West. And then I hurried back there.”
“Last night the weather was good, so I presume you had left your father standing on the sidewalk.”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“And do you know what time it was when you left him to get the car?”
“Not precisely. It must have been about two o’clock.”
“Two?” Here was a surprise. If Ivan and Morris were both telling the truth, the journalist had been tipped off about the murder at least fifteen minutes before it happened. “Are you sure, Mr. Watt?”
“It must have been two. I had glanced at my watch at twenty to, and at that time we were still working on the annual report. I’d guess it took us twenty minutes from then to put away our papers and get downstairs.”
“How long would you say it was then from the time you left your father until the time when you got back to the front entrance of the office building?”
“I checked my watch while phoning Platinum Taxi. It was eleven minutes past two then. I’d say I got back to where I’d left my father at two fifteen or a little later.”
Morris used a fine old pocket watch rather than a wrist model. As I had with Ivan MacAllister, I checked the time currently indicated and got the owner’s assurance that it hadn’t been reset since the night before. My watch was running just under two minutes faster. I had no idea yet how crucial these stray minutes would turn out to be, but I was taking phone company time, which agreed with Danforth Dollar Taxi time, as the most reliable. Compared to that standard, Ivan’s Bulova was a minute fast, my Waterbury a minute slow, and bringing up the rear at three minutes slow was Morris Watt’s Heuer—which I noticed was engraved with his father’s name: To our dear son Digby on his 21st birthday. A hand-me-down, in short.
“Mr. Watt,” it occurred to me to ask, “what is your position at Dominion Consolidated Holdings?”
A new look of pain clouded the other man’s face.
“I
