Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 25, No. 3, March 26, 1980

A Deal in Dust by Dale L. Walker

Penn told Bailey he might have some important information...

Jack Penn smelled like a frycook and I wouldn’t want to eat where he worked. The effluvium of hot grease and onions that radiated from him was thick enough to slice with a spatula. Also, he dressed the part — a T-shirtful of belly hanging over the waist of white trousers. A hamburger and fries in white sneakers.

I saw him occasionally at Bronk’s, the saloon on Fourteenth and Apple where night workers tend to congregate before heading home to the sack. Bank guards, hospital workers, hack drivers, off-duty cops, and morning-newspaper people like me favor Bronk’s — mainly because it’s open, centrally located, and cheap. But people also like the proprietor-bartender, Leo Nagursky, a gnarly faced, fireplug-shaped former Chief Gunner’s Mate who serves unwatered booze and cold beer in glassware you can see through.

Although I didn’t know his name then, I talked with Jack Penn at Bronk’s twice. The first time he was standing kneading his hands under the hot-air dryer in the men’s room while I jabbed at the soap dispenser, trying to liberate a little of the latherless yellow slime that was clogging it.

“The Oilers took a bad licking from Pittsburgh Sunday, huh?” Penn said in my general direction.

“Huh?” I answered to his image in the mirror, identifying his odor and line of work.

“Why can’t the damn Cowboys be the ones playing the Steelers instead of Houston?” he said wistfully.

An Oiler fan? Here? I thought. “Yeah,” I said. “The Cowboys should have to play them.”

With that and a quick glance at me in the mirror, he pushed through the door, leaving some of the spoor behind.

The second and last time I spoke to him I was sitting on one of Bronk’s barstools, head propped on one hand, nursing a draft Bud and mindlessly watching a TV program called something like “Celebrity Challenge.” It consisted of grown men and women, together with ungrown boys and girls — all of them stars of various small-bore TV shows — klutzing around an obstacle course of some kind. The course was so rudimentary Sidney Greenstreet could have breezed through it without breathing hard, but an adult sports announcer was ooh-ing and aah-ing and asking serious questions of the sweating celebs as if he was covering the Munich games. It was stupid and embarrassing. Naturally, I was fascinated with it.

“Hey, excuse me,” a voice to my left said. “Are you Bailey? The Bailey that writes for the Sentinel?”

I swiveled my face on my palm to answer, but I knew who was talking to me. Sherlock used to leave Watson gaping by identifying people’s trades by the calluses on their thumbs or the ink on their cuffs. My deductive reasoning is a lot simpler — a whiff of grease and onions equals frycook.

“I’m Bailey,” I said to Penn. “How’d the Oilers do Sunday?”

“Huh?” He’d forgotten our previous conversation. “Oh, they beat hell out of the Bengals. What I wanted to say, though — I’d like to talk with you sometime. I read a story of yours and I might have something you’d be interested in.”

I’ve been a police reporter too long — twenty-seven years all told — to make the mistake of wondering what a frycook could have to tell me that I’d be interested in. Some of the best tips I’ve ever had have been from complete strangers who saw my byline and called me. And since the Sentinel sometimes runs a little half-column mug shot of me with my choicer stories, I’m recognized in a bar now and then.

But I did make a mistake with Penn, now that I think back on it. If I had it to do over, I wouldn’t have been so snappish. Maybe I was anxious to get back to the poor man’s Olympics on TV — and maybe I’m getting old. You can’t rewrite history.

“What do you mean, might have something I’d be interested in?” I said. “I’m Bailey, I’m here, you’re there, start talking.”

Penn looked me over and grinned. “Naw, the time ain’t right,” he said. He hoisted his schooner, his gullet worked up and down twice, and about four inches of beer slid down. He put the glass on the bar, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and said, “I just wanted to know what you look like in person. I’ll see you around in here again and we’ll have a big ol’ talk.”

Before I could say anything he slipped off the stool and walked to the door. He shot a salute at Bronk, who was standing at the door end of the bar, and walked out, his hands jammed into the pockets of his whites.

“Bailey?”

Rasmussen, my nominee for chief of the Riverton Police Department, and my top “informed source” on the force, was a dead giveaway. His voice had the melodious quality of one of those rock-polishing machines.

“Yes, Rasmussen, it’s Bailey. Who else answers this phone? Joseph Pulitzer?”

“Hey, that’s a real good one, Bailey. Anyway, we got a stiff. You takin’ notes?”

“Yes, I’m takin’ notes.”

“O.K. The deceased is a white male, age twenty-six, five-nine, 185 pounds, brown hair, brown eyes, tattoo of the name ‘Thelma’ in a heart on the inside left forearm, tattoo of a dagger dripping blood and the words ‘Crockett, Texas’ on left bicep.”

The tattoo descriptions caused something to click in my head. “How’d he get it?”

“Two big-caliber slugs. One in the head, the other in the neck.”

“When and where was the body found?” It was almost five and I wondered whether our competition, the Press, Riverton’s afternoon paper, already had the story.

“No more than two, three hours ago. A guard at the Glover Company — you know, that wholesale electronics place on Merchant and Silver — moved a big piece of cardboard in the alley and found the deceased under it. Guy’d been dead maybe eight hours.”

“Got a name?”

“John Robert Penn. Maybe a transient. He was carrying a Texas driver’s license, forty bucks in his wallet, and what looks like a payroll stub from the Cinderella Diner — that’s a chili-and-ptomaine parlor on Eldorado near Fourteenth.”

At the mention of the chili parlor something else went click. I asked a question I do not ordinarily ask.

“How was the guy dressed?”

“Dressed? I don’t know. Hold on.”

I hung on.

“Bailey?”

“Yeah?”

“The deceased had on white pants, a T-shirt, and white canvas shoes.”

Something went click-click-click and it wasn’t the phone.

It was a slow day for local news and my story on the Penn murder was played for more than it deserved, page 1-B above the fold with a two-column head.

The story contained everything I had been able to get. Penn had been dead nine to eleven hours when the Glover Company guard found him. That put the murder at around 4:00 a.m. No one had turned up who heard the shots or saw anything. I had phoned the Cinderella Diner and talked to Richard Hayes, the owner. He said Penn worked the four-to-midnight shift the night before he was killed. Hayes said he couldn’t account for what Penn did after he left work. I quoted him in my story.

This, plus the information that Penn had apparently not been robbed, that there was no sign of a struggle, and that the Riverton police had determined Penn had no close living kin, about summed up what I had. I did mention that the Merchant Street warehouse neighborhood, in one of the oldest sections of Riverton, was only a few blocks from Penn’s fifty-dollar-a-month slum apartment, where he’d lived for a total of five weeks.

Naturally I reread clips of my stories in the Sentinel over the past five weeks, trying to get some idea of what Penn had read that made him want to talk to me. But the past couple of months had been lean — an embezzlement so picayune it had netted the culprit, a twenty-two-year veteran of the Riverton National Bank, less than $800, a piece on the rising number of late-night armed robberies of convenience stores; an Op Ed column in which I pontificated, at my editor’s insistence, on “senseless vandalism” — as if there’s any other kind — using recent examples at Riverton College and one of our largest public parks; and a feature on the “suicide curve” on the Interstate south of town, which had claimed several lives so far this year.

There was a batch of other things, but they were unbylined pieces and Penn couldn’t have known I’d written them.

“It would bug me too,” Willis, my city editor, said. “He probably didn’t have anything big to tell you, but who knows? When I was on the city beat an old lady stopped me outside the Mayor’s office and gave me a tip that tore the lid off that favor-peddling operation a few years ago. Her son worked for a big construction company that had been awarded a fat contract even though it was a long way from low bidder on the job. The son told his mother what he overheard in the office, she told me, and I lit the fuse. You just never know.”

“Thanks for that comforting example,” I said.

Willis smiled out of the corner of his mouth, slopping paste on several fragments of a story he had edited, scissored into fragments, and was reuniting.

“Seriously — maybe you should work it the other way. Get as much information on Penn as you can and try to fit that to what you wrote over the last couple of months.”

I said, “Now I know why you get that big paycheck every week.”

The Sentinel, being a class newspaper, has a class “library.” This consists of a wooden cigarette-scarred bookcase by the wire room containing a set of encyclopedias once offered a volume a week by a local supermarket; a gazetteer so old Istanbul is still called Constantinople; a half dozen vintage copies of Playboy, their covers and contents disintegrating and their centerfolds long ago appropriated by the chief photographer for scholarly study in his darkroom; three World Almanacs, the latest three years old; an unabridged dictionary that will give a hernia to anyone who moves it from its shelf; a copy of Fowler’s Modern English Usage which has never been opened, much less used; an Associated Press Stylebook decorated with linking coffee-cup rings; a thermos bottle, two or three empty sacks that once contained the lunches of our brown-bagging wire editor, and six styrofoam cups, containing the sickening remains of coffee and cigarette butts.

The library does have one valuable thing, evidence of the fixation the newspaper business has on the newspaper business: the Ayer Directory of Publications. It is divided into states, then alphabetically into cities, then alphabetically under that every newspaper and periodical published in that city together with the circulation of each, when it was founded, who owns it, the address, the name of the editor, and a lot of other information in squint-producing eight-point type.

I looked up Crockett, Texas (pop. 22, 415) and got the name of its paper, a daily called the Chronicle, whose editor was Charles Craddock. I swear — Charles Craddock of the Crockett Chronicle.

I called Craddock, introduced myself, and told him of Jack Penn’s murder while he took notes on the typewriter. The Riverton PD, I said, had learned from the Crockett PD that Penn had no close living kin but that he had an ex-wife, Thelma Day, still living in Crockett. I wanted to talk to her.

“I’m leafin’ through the phonebook while you’re talkin’,” Craddock said. “Here’s three Days. Let me check the City Directory.” He came back a minute later and gave me her number.

“Bailey, I’d predate your keepin’ me posted on all this,” Craddock said. “If they get Penn’s killer call me up, day or night. Meantime, I’ll scout around here and see if I come across anything on Penn you don’t already know. Let’s trade information. We ain’t in competition and this story sure as hell beats the grand openin’ of the John Deere store.”

The phone rang a long time before she answered it, but when she did Thelma Day had one of these Deep-in-the-Heart-of-Takes-Us accents you always hear imitated but never believe. Believe it, she had it — also a very real ingenuousness. The Riverton Homicide people had already called her. She knew of Penn’s death, but she didn’t hesitate a split second before answering everything I asked and didn’t seem to begrudge me the time despite the kids I could hear screaming in the background. Every once in a while she covered the mouthpiece of the phone to yell something at them.

The upshot of it was that she didn’t know much — at least she didn’t think so. She and Penn were married in the middle of his four-year hitch in the Navy. They had dated a few times in high school, and when he had come home after some sea duty out of San Diego she’d fallen in love with his swagger, his uniform, and his exotic stories of Japan, Guam, and Hawaii.

“You got to remember, I’ve never been farther out of Crockett than Houston,” she explained. “All that adventure stuff just thrilled me right down to my socks.”

Five months before he was due for discharge, Thelma had to call Penn in San Diego to inform him that his twenty-year-old sister Joann was dead. Joann was a student at Southeastern Texas State College, a small liberal arts school in Houston. She had jumped or fallen from the window of her fifth-floor dormitory room. The post-mortem revealed the presence of some kind of drug in her system and her death was ruled accidental, probably attributable to drugs.

Joann and her brother Jack had been very close. Their parents were both dead and Jack had sent part of his Navy pay to Joann to keep her in school. “She wasn’t wild,” Thelma Day said, “but nobody knew who she ran around with at that place.”

Jack came home on emergency leave to bury his sister, then returned to San Diego to finish out his enlistment. When he was discharged, things had soured between him and Thelma. She said he didn’t seem to want to go to work, neglected her, and spent most of his time in Houston. “All he ever told me was that he had to find out what happened to Joann,” Thelma told me. “We couldn’t live on his musterin’-out pay and whenever he’d come back here from one of his trips to Houston, why, we spent most of the time argyin’.”

They had been divorced six months ago and she hadn’t seen him since.

“I got married again not long after our divorce went through,” Thelma told me. “I guess you could say I’m the marryin’ kind. Anyway, Ernie Day, my husband, he was a widower with three young kids — the ones you hear climbin’ the curtains in the background. Ernie’s got the Delco franchise down here and we’re doin’ just fine.”

Thelma said she had no idea why Penn had come to Riverton and no idea why anybody would want to kill him. “Jack never did anybody no harm,” she said with genuine sadness. “When Joann died he lost all of his ambition...” Her voice trailed off to a sigh.

I thanked her and told her I wished her and Mr. Day much happiness. I meant it. Before hanging up, I asked her if she had a photograph of Jack. She said she did and she would special-delivery it to me.

Next I called Jerry Quinn, Riverton’s homicide lieutenant, and passed along the information Thelma Day had given me. The story she had told his people was virtually identical to what she’d told me. Quinn said they were checking into Joann Penn’s death in Houston, hoping they could make some tie between that and Penn’s coming to Riverton. He said that tossing Penn’s two-room apartment had produced nothing significant — just his clothes and other personal stuff, a stack of magazines and paperback books, and some literature from Riverton College — no letters or notes or indication of any kind as to why or precisely when he had come to town, or what he had intended doing here. The college had no record of his attending classes and the literature found in his room was the common “Take One” variety of handout he’d probably picked up off a table in the registrar’s office at the campus.

Penn had visited the campus at least once. Quinn’s people had found a visitor’s parking permit from Riverton College in the glove compartment of his 1973 navy-blue Pinto Runabout, along with a campus map. The car had been found in the parking lot behind his apartment house. It had Texas plates and 63,000 miles on the odometer.

I called Craddock in Crockett — still loving the combination — and gave him a summary of the Thelma Day and Jerry Quinn information.

“Do you think Penn came up there because he found out somethin’ about his sister’s death?” Craddock asked me.

“It’s possible, but I can’t think what it might be,” I said. “Thelma said Joann’s death was all Jack could think about.” I told Craddock our homicide investigators were looking into the situation at Southeastern Texas State and asked him if he could find out more details on Joann Penn’s death or what Jack had been doing on the campus.

“I’ve never been on that campus,” Craddock said, “but I know where it is. I think I’ll mosey on over there early tomorra, bout when it opens. I’ll call you if I get anythin’.”

I reread my clippings. Penn had apparently visited the Riverton campus at least once, picking up the literature and keeping the visitor’s parking permit they’d given him at the gate. I had written of the college only once in the past couple of months, researching my “senseless-vandalism” column. Several faculty offices in the chemistry building had been broken into, a ton of file-cabinet paper had been dumped and strewn on the floor, desks had been ransacked, and a word resembling “hog” in two-foot-high letters had been spray-painted on a wall outside the offices. The campus police had investigated and reasoned that the vandals may have been searching for exams but, failing to find any, were content to render the offices unusable for a few days.

Our education editor, Connie Oates, had followed up on the vandalism incident but the campus police had turned up nothing new in the month since it had happened.

I wondered if Penn might have been the vandal. If so, what had he been searching for? Why would he bother to take along a spray can of paint if he had been looking for something? Nothing fit.

My second-day story on the Penn murder, which ran on Friday, was a routine recap of the case together with the oddments of information I had gathered from Lieutenant Quinn. For the customarily skimpy Saturday edition I wrote a brief Riverton Police Department Homicide Investigators Report No New Leads type of story and let it go at that.

Willis was in an editor’s conference when I dropped my no-new-leads story into his wire basket along with some other non-Penn copy. At the adjacent desk, Tanner, the Assistant City Editor, was working over the late edition of the Press with an outsized pair of shears, clipping the stories he would have city-side reporters follow up on.

Tanner smokes cigarettes himself, but he’s devoted to my pipe. He caught a whiff of my new aromatic tobacco and gave me his daily pipe crack. “What are you smoking now,” he asked without looking up, “fudge?”

To acknowledge Tanner’s jokes in any way is to encourage him, so I said, “Tell Willis I’m on my way down to see Hayes, the guy who runs the diner where Penn worked. And tell him I want to talk to him about my Sunday story.”

The only thing Hayes could add to what he had already told me on the phone was that Penn had seemed unusually relaxed when he reported to work at four o’clock on the afternoon before he was killed.

“He wasn’t the relaxed type,” Hayes said, setting a cup of coffee in front of me. The Cinderella Diner owner was large and hairy in a loud Hawaiian-print sportshirt and wrinkled slacks; a gap-toothed man with a sidewall haircut. “Jack didn’t talk much and we didn’t socialize. He was a good cook and a hard worker but his mind was always somewhere else. When he came in here last Tuesday, though, he seemed — well, looser. We even talked a little and had some lemon meringue pie and coffee. I left at five like always, and that was the last time I ever saw him.”

Hayes said the pie-and-coffee talk was about football and the weather. He said he’d never asked Penn what he was doing in Riverton. Judging from the fading lettering, the fly specks and the thumb marks on his Help Wanted sign now in the diner window again, I could see that Hayes was used to hiring people who didn’t stick around to make a career of it.

Leo Nagursky, the “Bronk” of Bronk’s saloon, is an ex-Navy gunner and said the only time he really talked to Penn was the first time he saw the Texan at the bar.

“He was a draft-beer drinker,” Leo said, “so I set up a few on the house for a new customer. I knew he was Navy and not out long. Those were regulation whites he wore. We talked a little Navy, a little football — he was a big Oilers fan — and that was it. I don’t pry, so I didn’t learn much about him except he was a Texan, did a four-year hitch out of Dago, and made commissary third — that’s a cook — before he got out. I asked him if he’d thought about shipping over — you know, re-enlisting. He said he had thought about it but right then he had something more important to do. I remember wondering how important it could be to work in a diner somewhere so far from home.”

On Saturday morning I stopped at a doughnut shop on the way to the Sentinel and picked up a pint of black coffee and three plain doughnuts to go.

My mail included the photo Thelma Day had promised to send and I made my way to my desk. There, tepid coffee and sinkers at elbow, I pecked out a lead for the Penn story I had in mind for our fat Sunday edition. I didn’t have much in the way of news nor any way of knowing what the rest of the day would bring, so I started out:

Next I recapped Penn’s Navy background, his short-lived marriage, the tragic death of his sister from a drug-connected leap or fall from her dormitory window, Penn’s disappearance from Crockett, his appearance in Riverton, and his employment at the diner. I quoted Thelma Day, Richard Hayes, Lieutenant Quinn of Homicide, and Leo Nagursky.

I took the unfinished story over to Willis and told him I intended ending it by telling of my own experience with Penn at Bronk’s saloon, the cryptic remark he made to me about something I had written recently, my clipping search, and my idea that there might be a connection between Joann Penn’s death at the college in Houston and Jack Penn’s coming to Riverton and his visits to Riverton College.

Willis speed-read the copy and flipped it back to me. “You got any new art?” he asked. We had used Penn’s driver’s-license mug with the second-day story.

“I got a snapshot wedding picture of Thelma and Jack Penn,” I told him. “It’s usable.” Actually it was better than that. It was possible somebody would recognize him from it and come up with some information.

Before getting back to the typewriter, I put a call in for Charlie Craddock. He was in Houston but expected back shortly. I left a message.

By the time I finished talking to Craddock this time around I had grown to like him a hell of a lot, and we promised to get together, either there or here, some time soon.

He had left the Chronicle in the hands of his managing editor on Friday and had spent the better part of the day on the Southeastern Texas State campus, where he had come up with two important pieces of information — one, Joann Penn had died with a familiar drug in her bloodstream: PCP, the much-publicized “angel dust,” and, two, Penn had made a nuisance of himself on campus questioning students, security officers, faculty members, and anybody else he could collar, trying to find out who the drug dealers were.

Craddock had met a couple of students who had talked with Penn. They had told Penn Joann and some of her friends were involved in drugs — either as buyers or pushers. The students said it was possible Penn had picked up a lead, although they doubted it and refused to supply any names to Craddock.

As for the PCP, the students said it was a glut on the market.

“Now you know what the spray-paint was all about,” Craddock said, “and you’re makin’ out of all this the same thing I am. You got a pretty good story for your Sunday paper and so have I. Do you have a way of runnin’ a check at Riverton College for anybody that might have transferred there from Southeastern? If you find somebody you can bet your entire butt that Penn found him too.”

I told Charlie I’d be back in touch in a few hours.

The edges came together a little after that conversation. In newspaper work you need to know about drugs and I have a file drawer full of dope data: government pamphlets, clips from scientific journals, and wire-service copy. PCP is nothing new. It was originally an animal tranquilizer and is still used by some veterinarians. Its chemical name is phencyclidine hydrochloride. It can be a powerful central-nervous-system depressant or stimulant, depending on the amount taken. If s very versatile: you can eat it, inject it, snort it, or sprinkle some on tobacco, grass, oregano, or mint leaves and smoke it.

What it can do to you is equally versatile. You can get simple hallucinations, a hard-to-describe spaced-outedness, or a schizoid psychosis. You can claw your own eyes out, you can open your veins with a razor blade and feel no pain, or you can kill somebody or yourself.

Leaping from a window fits a PCP pattern and Joann Penn’s death was not the first such manifestation of it. The stuff first came into use in this country in the early 1950s as a surgical anesthetic but its potential for horror removed it from the market in 1965.

Two other PCP facts: Anybody who can read a recipe and get the ingredients can make it by the tubful. And among its nicknames, besides “angel dust” and “rocket fuel,” is one I hadn’t known or remembered until Craddock reminded me of it. PCP is also known as “hog.”

Connie Oates, as I mentioned, is our education reporter, a big, lovely woman who’s married to the Sentinel and can find page-one news in a PTA meeting. It was Saturday and getting late — not a good time to find out anything on a college campus — but Connie managed to get hold of a friend who works in the Riverton College personnel office. The idea was to run a check, as Craddock had suggested, on the faculty, starting with the Chemistry Department, to see if anybody had been hired recently from Southeastern Texas State.

Ten minutes later, Connie’s friend called. Nothing. And an hour after that with a report on the overall faculty. Also nothing.

“Let’s put it together, Bailey,” Connie said to me, seeing my hangdog expression. “The vandalism was in the Chemistry Department. The graffito was sprayed on the wall outside the faculty suite. It was a warning of some kind. If not, why didn’t Penn or whoever did it just spray some person’s name on the wall? Or something right over the person’s desk, instead of in neutral territory in the hall? Penn apparently didn’t find what he was after. He spilled everybody’s papers on the floor, ransacked all the desks, and sprayed ‘hog’ on the wall because he wanted the person to know he was after him.”

I told you she’s good. She reminds me of Colleen Dewhurst.

I put in my two cents. “O.K. But you’ve checked the faculty out. Why was Penn searching the chemistry offices? Because back in Houston he’d found out who his sister’s PCP dealer was and he trailed him here to Riverton College. He had to know the dealer had something to do with the Chemistry Department here — otherwise why would he single it out? Why would he bring along a spray can and write ‘hog’ on the wall?”

Connie nodded. “Penn knew he’d flush his dealer out with that word. It was unlikely that more than one person would know what it meant.”

“But if not a chemistry professor, who?” I asked.

Connie picked up one of my doughnuts and took a bite.

“Maybe a T.A.,” she said.

“What’s a T.A.?”

“A teaching assistant. They’re usually graduate students, working on a Master’s or a Doctorate. They help grade papers, assist in the classroom, even substitute teach once in a while.”

“Do they get an office?”

“No, but they have access to the office of the professor they work for. They file stuff, use his or her office to grade exams, and like that.”

“Can you get your friend to run a check on the T.A.’s in chemistry?” I asked her.

She was already dialing.

There’s a whole list of things you aren’t supposed to be able to get from a student’s record, but Connie Oates got what I needed.

The T.A.’s name was Albert Moorehead. He was from Houston, he had done his undergraduate work at Southeastern Texas State and had completed some work towards his Master’s Degree in chemistry when he left Texas about nine months ago — five months after Joann Penn’s death and very shortly after Jack Penn had returned home from the Navy to begin his search for Joann’s dealer. Moorehead showed up at Riverton College not long after he decamped from Houston, transferred his credits, paid the out-of-state tuition, and got a job as a T. A. for one of the chemistry professors.

Connie squeezed Moorehead’s Riverton address from her personnel friend and I called Jerry Quinn with that and the rest of what I had learned from the stunning Connie Oates and the man whose number I now dialed.

Rasmussen called a couple of hours before deadline. “Quinn told me to call you, Bailey. Moorehead bugged out a few days ago. His apartment is empty and the professor he worked for says he hasn’t seen him since last Tuesday. That would be the day before Penn got iced. Are you gettin’ all this down?”

“I’m gettin’ it, I’m gettin’ it,” I said.

“Quinn said to tell you the make we ran on Moorehead turned up some interesting stuff, including a couple of busts for dealing down on the border.”

“Anything else?” I asked.

“Nothing. Except Quinn said to tell you we got an all-points out on Moorehead. He probably won’t be hard to find.”

“Tell Quinn I said thanks.” I was about to hang up.

“Hey, Bailey, let me ask you something. Why did Quinn ask me to call you on this stuff? Do you think he’s on to me and you?”

“Forget it, Rasmussen,” I said comfortingly. “It’s just a coincidence.”

Willis ran my story on Sunday morning under the nameplate and a six-column head. It made no attempt to convince the reader that the murder of Jack Penn was solved. It just presented the facts and a little speculation from the mouths of people such as Lieutenant Quinn of Homicide.

I called Charlie Craddock from home on Sunday and we compared notes again. I read him my story and he read me his and we fawned all over one another.

He said that after he put his paper to bed at midnight and went home he couldn’t get to sleep. He kept his wife up half the night telling her about the case. “I’ll tell you somethin’, Bailey, I haven’t done that in more years than I can remember. What’d you do after deadline?”

I told him I took Connie Oates out to a big dinner. I explained about Connie and said, “I’ll tell you something, Charlie, the more I look at her the more I see Colleen Dewhurst.”

“Colleen Who-hurts?” he asked.

“Forget it, old friend,” I said. “I’ll tell you all about her and a bunch of other lies when I come down to buy you a drink. And we’ll also lift a glass in memory of Jack Penn — he tried to do good.”