Price. The newspapers got delivered at the front door of the house before daybreak, and I scooped them up at a few minutes after six. I sat on the brick steps and went through the Times first, page by page. There wasn’t a word about Bell’s death. Next I tackled the Herald-Tribune with the same result. That left the Daily News, which the Williamsons got for the household staff and which did a better job of covering crime news than the two silk-stocking newspapers. On page 22, down at the bottom, I spotted a brief piece with a one-column headline reading MAN SLAIN IN BRONX GANGWAY. The details were sparse, describing “the body of an unidentified man who appeared to be in his thirties” having been found in the Bronx gangway by a passerby late Friday night. The article went on to say that he had been shot three times according to police and that “neighbors did not report hearing gunshots, suggesting that a silencer may have been used in the killing.” The item ended, as so many of this sort did, with “police are conducting a thorough search for the perpetrator and also are seeking the identity of the dead man.”
