Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 39, No. 6, June, 1994

A Policy for Murder by Dick Stodghill

After a busy morning on the police beat and a greasy sandwich at the Buckeye Lunch, I was watching the passing parade on Main Street when a dandy straight from the pages of Esquire came sauntering by. His gray borsalino was set at a rakish tilt, the shine on his Florsheim wing-tips dazzled the eyes. A red carnation graced the lapel of his blue serge suit, and his neatly trimmed mustache would have looked at home on the upper lip of actor William Powell.

A dude of the first order, a type rarely encountered in the stout and hardy Industrial Valley. With studied casualness he flipped his cigarette toward the curb and turned in at the Mayflower, Akron’s finest hotel.

Sartorially speaking, the man was everything I was not. Sometime soon I would have to visit a shoeshine stand, then have my pants pressed. In truth they were more in need of cleaning than a hot iron, thanks to the snow and slush of an uncommonly cold December. Now with the temperature up to forty it seemed springlike until the jingling of a Salvation Army bell in front of Polsky’s department store served as a reminder that winter was in its infancy.

I forgot the weather and the dapper stranger when Jack Eddy came bounding across State Street against the light. After sidestepping one car and deftly dodging another, he gave a one-finger salute to the driver of a boxy relic from the 1920’s when its horn blared “guh-doo-gah.”

As he hurried past I called, “Hey, fella, gotta match?”

He didn’t break stride or even glance my way. I swung into step beside him and said, “Where’s the fire?”

“Robbery at a jewelry store, buddy. Just came over the teletype from the JPA.”

Jack Eddy, an assistant manager at the Akron branch of Wellington’s National Detective Agency that winter of 1937-38, had told me months earlier that the agency was on contract with the Jewelers Protective Association to investigate all jewel robberies in the country. Even the G-men consulted Wellington’s extensive files on jewel thieves.

“You’re late,” I said. “The cops beat you by a few hours.” I mimicked the downtown newsboys: “R-e-e-ad all about it in the Times-Press.” Then normally again: “My story’s in the first edition.”

“No need to read about it, friend. The JPA report was all I needed to know it’s another Anderson Spangler job.”

“Anderson Spangler? Sounds like a stockbroker or vice-president at Firestone, not an outlaw.”

“Don’t let the monicker fool you, buddy. Spangler’s the sharpest case man in the country. He knows a good stone from a bad one, but that’s only the half of it. What sets him apart is his ability to judge distance down to the fraction of an inch. When it comes to working through an alarm system network, nobody can touch him.” He took a photo from a jacket pocket and handed it to me. “That’s the bugger.”

I glanced at the picture, then pulled up short. “Hold on, Jack, you’re headed the wrong way. I saw this guy go into the Mayflower not five minutes ago.”

“Not a chance, sport. Spangler never shows his face within a hundred miles of a job once it’s set up. And always has a few unimpeachable witnesses to back up his alibi.”

“Don’t tell me, Jack. That’s the guy as sure as you’re born.”

He saw I was serious. For a long moment he stood tugging on an ear, then started back toward the hotel. “Won’t hurt to check, I guess, but I still say you’re whistling Dixie.”

Jack Eddy came to a halt just inside the door. Anderson Spangler was seated in a lobby armchair reading an early edition of the Beacon Journal, the other paper in town. After pushing his workaday black fedora far back on his head Jack murmured, “If I wasn’t seeing it with my own eyes, I wouldn’t believe it.” He gave me a light poke on the arm. “I owe you one, buddy.”

Jack straightened his hat and adjusted his necktie before walking over to where the out-of-town dandy was seated. Sensing his presence, Spangler glanced up from his paper, did a doubletake, then sprang up from the overstuffed chair, right hand extended, a big smile on his face. “Jack Eddy! What brings you to this burg, my friend?”

“I’ve been here since last spring, Andy, and I’ll bet you’ve known that all along.”

A pained expression came over Spangler’s face. “Now, Jack, you know I don’t like being called Andy. Are you saying you’re not in Indianapolis any more? But you’re still with Wellington’s, of course?”

“Come off it, Andy. You know I wouldn’t leave the agency, and you probably knew I was being transferred before I got the word myself.”

“Jack, Jack, Jack. You give me far too much credit, but then you always have.”

“The man isn’t alive who could give you too much credit, pal. But what’s with you these days, staying in town while a job’s being pulled?”

“A job? You’ve lost me, Jack.”

Their thrust-and-parry word game continued awhile before Jack got around to introducing me to Spangler. We sized each other up while shaking hands. There was something in his pale gray eyes that told me he wasn’t just another man with the taste and money for fancy clothes. Smooth as silk on the outside, hard as nails underneath. Again William Powell came to mind, this time playing the role of Nick Charles in The Thin Man.

I tagged along when Jack Eddy set out again for the jewelry store. When Jack flashed Spangler’s photo, the employees recognized him immediately. He had been in several times and a few days earlier had purchased an expensive diamond stickpin.

The thieves had bypassed one display case completely, taken only a few items from another, several more from a third. It was no smash-and-grab job.

With the help of an alarm system schematic given him by the manager, Jack showed me things I had missed on my earlier visit. He pointed out how carefully the holes had been cut in the glass of each showcase, coming close to and yet missing the all-but-invisible wires that would have triggered an alarm. And how in getting to the cases the thieves had worked their way through a maze of wiring concealed under a blue carpet that had since been rolled back.

Even more impressive was the hole bored in the wall from the store next door. The thieves had entered a rear door of the adjacent room, first disabling a simple alarm. Once inside they had gone to work on a wall that to me appeared much like any other. In reality it was laced with wires that looked a lot like strips of narrow electrical tape. The hole, about twenty inches square, was in the one wire-free place at a convenient height for squeezing through. Anywhere else, or an inch the wrong way in any direction, and a squad of policemen would have awaited them in the jewelry store. One thing was obvious: all fat men could be crossed off the list of suspects.

“Does Spangler have X-ray eyes or what?” I asked. “How could he do it?”

“Maybe with a copy of this,” said Jack, drumming a finger on the schematic. “Maybe not. I don’t know how the guy works but I’d give my right arm to learn his secret.”

I went back to the showcases. “It gets me how little they took. Once you’re inside a place, why not just load up with all you can carry away?”

“Because Spangler doesn’t do business with any ten-cents-on-the-dollar fence. If that were the case, buddy, we’d have nailed him and his boys long ago. He’s interested only in the best stones, ones that can be re-cut or reset without being identifiable. He’d ignore the Hope diamond unless he was certain it could be reworked in a way that no one would be the wiser.”

“No more than they took, is it worth all the trouble?”

Jack gave a tense laugh. “Believe me, friend, it is. But it takes a certain type of man, not your everyday thief. Fortunately Spangler is the only one of them around right now. And you can bet he was choosy in picking his crewmen and didn’t leave anything to chance in training them.”

“If Spangler’s as good as you say, how did you find out he even exists?”

“He made a mistake on his first job a dozen years ago in Indianapolis. He was sixteen at the time.”

“Kind of young for a master criminal, isn’t it?”

“Spangler was born with more know-how than most thieves acquire in a lifetime. He had it all figured out by his junior year at Shortridge High.”

“So what was that one mistake?”

“Took more than he should have, then went to a ten-cents-on-the-dollar fence. Live and learn, buddy.”

After supper at the boardinghouse on Dudley Street that was home to both of us, Jack Eddy crossed the hall from his room and rapped on the door of mine. He shook his head when I said, “Getting anywhere on the jewel robbery?”

I was spiffing up for a date with Sue Baney. Jack sat on the edge of the bed and watched as I knotted my necktie. The tail was too long so I had to undo it and start over. Jack laughed when a third attempt proved necessary. He said, “I can’t figure it out, friend.”

“I’ve been trying to use the crease from the last time as a guide but it won’t come out right.”

“I’m not talking about that remnant from a horse blanket you call a necktie. Anderson Spangler, I can’t figure why he stayed in town while his crew pulled the heist. By the way, at the time he was in an all-night poker game at the Portage Hotel with a real estate broker, a city councilman, and a bigshot at General Tire. His hanging around doesn’t add up unless he picked a store in Akron just to get my goat.”

“That would be a sap’s play, Jack. You’re flattering yourself thinking it’s a personal thing between the two of you. In a risky situation there’s only one thing that would make a man step out of character and that’s a woman.”

He was shaking his head. “What makes this different is that I’ve been on Spangler’s tail for years.”

“And he always stuck to his routine. Why change now?”

Lost in thought, Jack didn’t reply. When I was ready to leave, he got up, grinning, and gave me a one-knuckle punch on the arm, the kind that stings like a shot from a dull needle. “Maybe I’m slipping, buddy. I’ve got an operative on him at the Mayflower, so we should know before long if you’re right about its being a dame. If you are, lunch is on me tomorrow.”

I was so confident I could already taste the spaghetti at the Walsh Brothers’ place downtown.

It had been a great evening until we stopped for sodas at Kesselring’s far out on Triplett Boulevard near the airport. When we went outside again, my ’32 Chevy wouldn’t start. There was nothing to do but call a cab, drop Sue Baney at her apartment, and continue home.

While paying the cabbie I saw Jack Eddy peering out the oval window of the front door. “Now what?” he said, smirking. “Don’t tell me, let me guess. Your clunker gasped its last breath, and you were somewhere on the outskirts of town at the time, right?”

“And you find that amusing, do you?”

“Buddy, I’ve been telling you for months to junk that rust bucket. Now maybe you’ll listen.”

He led the way to the parlor where at first glance pudgy Mabel Klosterman, the only one who hadn’t gone up to bed, appeared to be reading The Ladies’ Home Journal. Behind it I saw she was holding Jack Woodford’s latest sexy novel. The excitement of it was making her squirm around on her chair.

Jack handed me the back section of the Times-Press, then turned to the used car ads in the Beacon Journal. I didn’t find much of interest but looked up when he began chuckling. “Here’s one for you. A 1931 Essex, thirty-nine bucks.”

“Very funny. Not much available in my price range.”

“In your price range you should be looking under bicycles.”

“You’re a riot tonight, Jack. A real riot.” After scanning a few more ads I tossed the paper aside. “Did you hear from the man keeping an eye on Spangler?”

“Yeah, and for once you were on the beam. He went stepping out with a broad, a cute piece of fluff according to the op. They were back at the hotel dancing when I hung up the phone about the time your cab pulled up out front.”

The telephone was in the hallway near the front door, which explained why he was standing there as if he were the housemother awaiting my arrival. Oh well, I told myself, the evening wasn’t a complete washout. I might not have transportation in the morning, but I’d have spaghetti for lunch.

A wrecker had towed my car to City Chevrolet, a large dealership on Market Street a few blocks east of downtown. After work I braved a biting west wind and walked there to see how things stood. A mechanic had already given it a quick look, so I said, “Whaddya think, can it be fixed?”

He gave me a baleful stare. “Anything can be fixed, ace, but if this was a horse I’d shoot it.”

The estimate was eighteen dollars to get the weary old buggy running again. For seventy-five they could put it in halfway decent shape, but no promises would come with the job.

I went outside and wandered around among the used cars, ducking behind one whenever a salesman came into view. A 1936 Ford Tudor looked good but was a little steep at three fifty-nine. I admired a nifty ’35 Terraplane priced at two seventy-nine, then stopped for a while at a ’32 Chevy deluxe coach much like my own car. Instead of being gray with the paint worn down to the primer, this one was a sparkling ebony black. At a hundred seventy-nine dollars the price seemed right.

Uncertain about what to do, I walked back to Main Street, hoping to bum a ride home with Jack Eddy. What little was left of the afternoon was ominously dark even for December. Headlights were coming on, lights from store windows cast oblong patterns on the sidewalk. Snow began falling before I reached the shelter of the Metropolitan Building.

While Jack wound up his day reading reports filed by Wellington operatives, I relaxed in a comer of his private office. We both looked up when the woman who doubled as receptionist and secretary cleared her throat at the doorway. “A Mr. Anderson Spangler is here to see you, Mr. Eddy.”

I laid aside the Wellington magazine, a house organ printed on slick paper and distributed to the thirty-three agency offices around the country. A soldier on horseback adorned the cover. Above him in old English type was a motto: WELLINGTON’S — WHERE WRONG-DOING MEETS ITS WATERLOO. Despite that affront to the senses, the stories inside were interesting. The latest issue contained a piece I had done on a Jack Eddy caper along with the usual fare on modem crime-fighting techniques, accounts of recent events, and adventure tales of Wellington agents pursuing Black Bart, the James gang, and other desperados in the Old West.

“Think he’s come to confess?” I said jokingly.

“Sure, buddy. And that was a pig that just flew past the window.”

Spangler walked briskly into the room, hat in hand like one businessman calling on another. Same business, different approach. Jack motioned him to a chair. “What’s on your mind, Andy?”

Spangler winced but allowed Jack’s deliberate use of the nickname to pass without comment. After a period of silently eyeing each other Jack said, “Rather talk in private?”

With a laconic smile Spangler looked toward my corner of the room. “Not unless your friend writes up the stories he hears in your office.” I stole a glance at the magazine I had just laid aside.

“Okay, so spill it.”

For a moment Spangler toyed with his pencil mustache. “There’s a girl I met here in Akron, Jack. She’s in a spot of trouble, and I’d like you to see if you can get her out of it.”

“Forget it, Andy. The agency isn’t taking you on as a client.”

“Not me, Jack, Beverly Keeler. She’s a sweet kid, you’ll see, and innocent as a newborn babe. She’s got money to cover your fee, so I’ll be completely out of the picture. That’s straight, word of honor.”

Rather than laughing, Jack tilted back in his chair and ran slim fingers through sandy brown hair that at twenty-six was already growing thin on top. Its sparseness went well with his angular features. When he leaned forward again, his elbows were on the desk, chin resting on folded hands. “Okay, shoot. But no guarantees, understand?”

“Sure, Jack, I know how it goes. It’s like this. A while back Bev worked for a lawyer, a Stefan Damokura. Legal secretary, girl of all trades, know what I mean? So twenty grand that was supposed to have been in an escrow account at the bank disappears, and he accuses Bev. Now I ask you, Jack, would anybody pull a stunt like that, then stick around waiting to be collared?

“Anyway, the only other person in the office was a kid fresh out of law school just learning the racket. Now he’s the key witness, the one who makes it something more than Damokura’s word against Bev’s. Even that way the court would probably believe the lawyer, but this kid Kenneth DeRidder wraps it up like a Hershey’s kiss.”

Jack took a crooked cigarette from a crumpled pack of Pall Malls, checked to see it wasn’t broken, then lit it and blew a perfect smoke ring. “So what makes you think I could do anything to help her? What’ve you got in mind, Andy?”

“Nothing, Jack, and that’s the truth, so help me. It’s out of my line, but I figure if anyone can get to the bottom of things it’s you. So will you talk to her?”

Jack wasn’t quick with a reply, so Spangler said, “Look, what’s to lose? Have her come in, and if you buy what she says, see what you can do. If you don’t, toss her out the door. But that won’t happen, take my word for it.”

Jack Eddy hesitated a moment longer before giving a shrug of acceptance. “Maybe I’m nuts, but okay, send her in. One thing, if I do take the case, the first time I even suspect you’re entering into it someway I’ll go to the judge and lay the whole thing out for him. Got that, Andy?”

Spangler arose, a wry smile on his face. “If I didn’t figure that’s the way you’d play it, Jack, I’d be talking to somebody else. A fair shake for the kid, that’s all I want.”

When he was gone Jack sat tapping a pencil against his desk for a minute or so, then turned to me. “Whaddya think, buddy?”

“I think you said one thing that makes sense.”

“What was that?”

“Maybe you’re nuts.”

Everyone offered conflicting advice about my car. The most succinct came from my boss, city editor Ben Goldsmith: “Get the old jalopy fixed, Geary, and now! I can’t have my police reporter riding around town on buses.”

Before dinner at the boardinghouse I discussed the situation with Mr. Reimer, the retired druggist. “Be very cautious, Abraham,” he said. “We’re in a recession, you know, and a great many economists think it will get worse in the months ahead.”

That sort of talk always made me wonder when the Depression had ended and the recession had begun. The difference escaped me, as it did the laid-off rubberworkers who gathered in small groups on Akron street corners and discussed matters beyond the ken of any economist in a warm and cosy office. It wasn’t as bad as 1932, but that oft-mentioned corner that prosperity was just around had proved to be a long one.

Kitty Bauer, the vivacious daughter of the landlord, came flouncing into the parlor. “Are you still talking about cars?” she said. “For heaven’s sake, Bram, buy a new one. Something ritzy to impress Sue Baney.”

Her father, who so far had escaped the latest round of layoffs at Goodyear, looked up from his newspaper. “Humph! That boy has as much business buyin’ a new car as I have buyin’ a house out on West Hill so I can hobnob with the Firestones and the Seiberlings.” He shifted his frown to me. “Act like you got some sense, young fella, and get yourself a nice Ford about two or maybe three years old.”

Bus Bauer drove a twelve-year-old Oakland but swore by anything Henry Ford produced. It was hard to figure; Bus was a diehard union man and Henry wasn’t known as a booster of collective bargaining.

Thoughts of cars were forgotten when Mrs. Bauer called, “Supper’s on the table!” We were no more than seated in the dining room when the phone rang. Bus Bauer mumbled an oath while getting up to answer it, returned quickly, and without any pretense of patience said, “Might’ve known it’d be for Jack Eddy. Sounds like your office again. After this you can answer the damn thing yourself.”

Jack winked at me while pushing back from the table. He did it again when he got back, this time at Kitty. When the platter of beef and noodles was empty and we’d polished off a bowl of custard, he took me aside. “Beverly Keeler’s at the agency waiting to see me. Want to ride along?”

Without a car I had nothing better to do. I shot the breeze in the outer office with Cal Andres, the op pulling night desk duty, while Jack talked to his prospective client.

When they came out together after half an hour, I blinked a couple of times and sat gaping. Beverly Keeler was a knockout. About five two, Sue Baney’s size, but slimmer. Her hair was a darker shade of brown than Jack’s, and her hazel eyes flecked with green were the warmest I had ever seen. Her shy little smile would have melted any man’s heart.

I couldn’t take my eyes off her while Jack was introducing us and saying something about going around the corner for coffee. Only when he said, “I’ll finish the paperwork and catch up with you in a few minutes,” did I realize he meant for me to escort Beverly on my own.

There were scattered patches of ice on the sidewalk, and her high heels weren’t meant for it. We had taken only a few steps when she slipped and I grabbed her around the waist to keep her from falling. After that she kept her arm linked in mine until we reached the New Deal Lunch on the southwest corner of Market and High.

When we were seated across from each other, I said, “So Jack’s taking on your case?”

“Do you know about it?”

“A little. I was there when Spangler talked to him this afternoon. Is this Damokura pulling a frameup?”

“I guess so. It was such a surprise... well, it hit me so hard I haven’t known what to think. Anders says Mr. Eddy is the best in the business. Is that true?”

“The best I’ve run across. If anybody can help you, he’s the one. You call Spangler Anders, do you?”

“All his friends call him Anders.”

“Know what line of work he’s in?”

“He’s a retail consultant.”

I choked on my coffee, but it wasn’t my place to set her straight. It was a good ruse for someone in need of explaining a job without regular hours that still managed to provide a bulging wallet. You might say Spangler showed jewelry stores how to move their best merchandise overnight.

Jack Eddy arrived sooner than I’d hoped. After that he did the talking. When called for, Bev supplied answers. Every so often she’d glance my way, smiling a little but not flirting. She was just being kind, seeing I was smitten. Anyone could have seen it. If Sue Baney had been there, I’d have had ten years of explaining ahead of me.

Jack, ignoring my loud yawn and weary sigh, drove south on Brown Street rather than heading home. Kenneth DeRidder’s small apartment was above a corner store. He admitted us reluctantly. Law books and legal pads covered with scribbling lay on an old library table that occupied most of the living room.

Horn-rimmed glasses enhanced DeRidder’s studious appearance. His hair was tousled; he had a prominent Adam’s apple and dark circles under his eyes. His necktie was still in place but loosened. The ambitious type, I surmised, who worked day and night. A more refined version of Jack Eddy.

Jack didn’t waste time on social amenities. “I think your boss set Beverly Keeler up for a hard fall.”

DeRidder raised a skeptical eyebrow. “Steve? Why would he do that?”

“For the money, why else? I don’t know the details yet, but I’m digging them out. In the meantime, if you’re smart, you’ll do some checking on your own. How will it look if you testify against her and it turns out she was framed? Think anyone’ll believe you weren’t in on it?”

DeRidder tossed his pencil aside, shaking his head. “I can’t go along with you. It’s pure speculation on your part, and you’re hardly an impartial party.” He spoke with conviction but didn’t appear all that sure of himself.

“Think about it, sport,” said Jack. “If I’m right and you’re wrong, it’ll make a lousy start for your career. Better do a little nosing around down at the office before you get on a witness stand.”

DeRidder’s expression led me to believe he would give serious thought to the advice.

Shortly after first edition deadline Jack Eddy came striding into the city room. After greeting the bigshots, taking particular care to cosy up to Ben Goldsmith, he settled on a corner of my desk and said, “Damokura plays the ponies in a big way, buddy. What does that tell you about the twenty grand missing from that escrow account?”

“Not much. Plenty of people bet the horses without dipping into someone else’s money.”

He laughed scoffingly. “You’d follow it up, friend. You know you would. I’ve got an appointment to see him in fifteen minutes, and I want you along.”

“Oh swell, Jack. This is going to be another of those confrontations, isn’t it? The kind where you go into your Jimmy Cagney act and start off by calling the other guy a dirty rat.”

He gestured noncommittally. “I can be nice as the next guy, buddy, when it seems like a smart move.”

True, I had seen him play at being subtle. His stock in trade, though, was shaking a man out of his routine, stripping him of his security, then watching to see what he did. Jack Eddy thrived on unpleasant encounters. I didn’t. Still, it would be interesting to observe Damokura’s reaction, so I followed him out the door. As usual I was ready to play the foil for Jack in hopes it would lead to a story.

No one would have mistaken Stefan Damokura’s office in the Delaware Building on South Main for one of Akron’s leading law firms. No walnut paneling, no thick carpet, no soft lights, no cute receptionist. Two scuffed wooden desks, neither occupied at the moment, were crowded into an outer room. The door to Damokura’s slightly larger space was ajar.

He looked up but didn’t stand. “C’mon back,” he called, then motioned us to cane-bottomed chairs that had started life in someone’s dining room.

I had seen Damokura around City Hall and the Summit County Courthouse. He was the sort of lawyer who always seemed to have a scruffy character in tow and talked boisterously to make sure no one missed seeing him. He looked about forty but could have been younger. It was hard to judge because of the flab and heavy jowls that go with starchy meals and too many hours on a barstool. His complexion was pasty, his black hair as greasy as an empty plate after a burger and fries at Ptomaine Tommie’s.

“You’re Eddy, right?” he said to Jack. “What’s the newsie doing here?” Apparently he had seen me around, too.

“Any objection?” said Jack. “Haven’t got anything to hide, have you?”

“That’s not the point. I don’t talk for publication.”

Jack feigned surprise. “Is that right? You could have fooled me, pal. Back at the agency I’ve got a stack of clippings where you had plenty to say. Most of it about Beverly Keeler forgetting to go to the bank with twenty thousand bucks.”

Damokura gestured deprecatingly. “The dame stole me blind.”

“Funny thing about those clippings, there wasn’t a word about the streak of bad luck you’ve had with the ponies.”

“Now just a minute. If you think—”

“No, sport, you’ve got it wrong. You’re the one who needs to do the thinking. I talked to your boy DeRidder, the naive kid you bluffed into believing Keeler did all your banking. Pretty clever the way you had her running down there every day with some piddling amount to deposit.”

“You know a better way? Stick it in a desk drawer, maybe?”

“You were setting her up, Damokura. An hour later you were probably drawing the dough out again. Now you’re counting on the kid backing up your story in court. Being a shyster yourself, you should know her lawyer will rip him to pieces on the stand. Sure, he saw her make all those trips to the bank, but I’ll bet he won’t testify he specifically recalls that twenty grand going along with her on one of them.”

“That’s slander, Eddy. And if your boy here prints a word of it, it’s libel. If you think I’m sitting still while some two-bit private dick casts aspersions—”

Jack’s laughter cut him short. “Knock it off with the hard-guy routine. You think I don’t know how much you’ve lost at the track? Or that I’m dumb enough to believe this hole-in-the-wall operation rakes in enough to cover it? Without the kid playing stooge for you, it’s going to be an interesting day in court.”

Jack had gotten up while he was talking. “C’mon, Bram, let’s get outa here. This setup smells so bad I need a little fresh air.”

Damokura was on his feet, too. “The Wellington Agency will be hearing from me,” he said, but it was all bluster. There was fear in his eyes, not indignation.

When we were in the corridor waiting for the elevator, I said, “One of these days you’re going to use that routine on the wrong person.”

Jack was grinning. “I pick my times, buddy. Damokura’s shaking in his shoes, and you know it. For the rest of the day Cliff Austin and Cal Andres will stick to him like flypaper. Maybe we’ll find out who he pals around with.”

“You’ve got solid information that Damokura was a big loser on the horses?”

“Enough to get started on. I’ve got a man digging up the details, and what I want you to do is talk to your friend Ruscinski, see if he can tell you anything.”

“Look, Jack, I’m not one of your ops. The last time I saw Dan Ruscinski I could tell he’s getting sick of my face.”

Jack laughed again and went into a boxer’s crouch, feinting and then punching me just above the belt buckle. A little harder than necessary, I thought. “Come on, buddy,” he said. “A face like yours, who could get sick of it? I noticed Beverly Keeler didn’t last night.”

I hated it when he said things that made me blush.

Dan Ruscinski had been a classmate of mine at old Kent School on South Arlington. He grew up on Chit-tendon Street where boys learned to use their fists early on in life. Dan had a drunk for a father and a shopworn mother who sometimes entertained the older boys at school.

Dan’s higher education came at the reformatory in Mansfield; then he did post-graduate work at the Ohio State Penitentiary. He learned his lessons well and now lived better than anyone I knew without gainful employment. Aside from Anderson Spangler, of course.

I found him in the usual place, a Howard Street bar misnamed The Lighthouse. Several characters you wouldn’t want to meet in a dark corner of a parking lot were with him at a table near the back of the long, dimly-lit room.

A nod of Dan’s head sent the others off to stools at the bar. When they were gone he gave me a smile that would have chilled an icicle. He motioned to a chair, then slid his own so close that we were shoulder to shoulder. “Back again, huh, Bram? Keep this up and you might wreck my good reputation. Some o’ the boys get nervous when a reporter’s around. Too tight with the bulls, know what I mean?”

“It’s important, Dan. A lawyer named Damokura, I understand he puts a lot down on the nags and may have gotten in trouble with somebody. Heard anything about it?”

For a second or two Dan studied me with unblinking eyes of blue so pale they seemed transparent. Then he got up, pulling me with him. Making a show of clapping me on the back and then laying an arm across my shoulders, he led me to where the unwholesome trio was seated at the bar.

“Boys,” he said, “I wan’cha to meet Bram Geary, an old pal o’ mine from back in school. Used to buddy around together out in East Akron. You know what the big lug done? Dropped by to wish me a merry Christmas and gimme a present.”

From one of his pockets he had produced a new fountain pen in a box, an expensive Waterman with a marbled finish. I was certain the office supply store down the street was short one item supposedly in inventory.

“Not that I do a whole lotta writin’,” he said, “but I really appreciate it, Bram. Now look, stop back sometime when you ain’t in a big hurry, and we’ll hoist a few and hash over old times, right?”

As he talked I found myself being ushered out the front door. I stood for a moment on the sidewalk, dazed by my sudden exit. Then everything became clear as I walked south past the Quaker Oats plant that made the Mill Street area of downtown Akron smell like a bowl of cereal. In his own way Dan had steered the two of us through rough waters.

Any answer to the question I asked would involve people best left alone. Poking into their affairs could be risky, perhaps fatal. By keeping my visit too short for conversation and contriving a reason for it, Dan had accomplished two things, fixed me up with an alibi for being there and covered his own backside. He assumed, correctly I hoped, that I had enough sense to recognize the oblique warning.

Universal Ford on Wooster Avenue was advertising used cars at a penny per pound. That was as interesting as most things in the paper. The Christmas doldrums had set in, and real news was scarce. We were running filler stories like the one saying coeds at Akron U were up in arms because Emily Post had written that it was okay for females to foot the bill on dates. Sounded like a reasonable idea to me.

The final edition had a story telling of the liner President Hoover running aground on a small island near China. Considering what had happened to the man it was named for, that gave the wags something to crack wise about.

The Japanese expressed “profound regrets for a terrible mistake” after sinking an American gunboat and two Standard Oil ships in the Yangtze River.

Someone had added things up and found that Akron ranked twelfth among U.S. cities in industrial production. Comforting news for those laid off from the rubber shops.

Exciting stuff it wasn’t. I turned to the comics page to see how Dick Tracy was doing in his pursuit of The Blank. Before I found out, the phone rang, and Jack Eddy said, “Guess who our friend Damokura went to see after our visit?”

“Mayor Schroy? Coach Porosky out at Buchtel High?”

“Knock off the cracks, friend. Vic Reiner, know him?”

“The name’s vaguely familiar.”

“He’s Jerry Lynch’s number one torpedo,” Jack said impatiently. “A reporter should know things like that.”

I didn’t know Lynch either, but kept it to myself. I knew of him, however. Just about everyone in Akron did. Lynch ran the numbers bank on the near southside, a part of town laced with factories and hovels occupied by people who could use a few extra bucks. Lucrative territory for a numbers runner. He also had men making book on horses in the factories and some of the neighborhood hangouts.

It was said that Jerry Lynch was a fine tenor and therefore a popular figure at the Hibernians and a few bars where the Irish got together. Some of those who appreciated his voice were the same ones who kept his operation running smoothly, meaning they got to listen at times when he wasn’t in a singing mood and his Irish eyes weren’t smiling.

“It figures,” I said, then told Jack about my brief encounter with Dan Ruscinski. Jerry Lynch qualified as one of the men in town whose business wasn’t up for scrutiny by those who enjoyed good health and preferred keeping it that way. If Stefan Damokura had placed some bad bets with one of Lynch’s boys, he wouldn’t have wanted to welsh.

“Better steer clear of that bunch,” I warned. Jack hadn’t laughed at my attempt to be funny, but he did then. He hung up without comment. Still laughing.

With Christmas putting the skids under real news, the following day dragged on interminably. Jack Eddy called to say the personnel at the jewelry store had been checked out and seemed above reproach. If one of them had passed a schematic of the alarm system to Anderson Spangler, the act had been masterfully concealed. The records of the company that had installed the system were guarded like Fort Knox. The investigation was as dead as my old Chevy.

The report of a murder on the far side of town near Firestone Park came too late for anything more than a page one brief in the final edition. “The body of a man shot at close range was discovered this afternoon in a Brown Street apartment...” I called in the report from the police station, then rode to the scene with detectives.

My stomach did a flip-flop when we pulled up in front of a familiar building, the grocery with Kenneth DeRidder’s apartment above. The youthful lawyer was seated facedown at the big table with the law books and legal pads, encrusted now with dried blood. The bullet that killed him had been fired much earlier, probably the night before.

I turned away, nauseated. After telling the detectives what little I knew about the victim, I went outside and gulped fresh air, then from a booth on the corner phoned the Wellington Agency. Jack Eddy wasn’t there. I boarded a Brown Street bus headed downtown.

Rather than returning to the Times-Press building, I transferred to another malodorous orange bus that took me to City Chevrolet. An hour later I drove home in my new car, the ebony black 1932 Chevy sedan that was much like my old one. They had allowed me twenty dollars on a trade-in, and I had wangled nineteen more off the price, so it set me back a hundred and forty. I put twenty down and would owe ten a month for a year.

As I was parking in front of the boardinghouse, Jack Eddy pulled his big Auburn into the space behind. He was out ahead of me, frowning a little as he looked over my purchase. “What did you do, buddy, have the old heap painted?”

“This is a different car, Jack,” I said indignantly. “My old one was a standard model, this is a deluxe coach.”

“Well, excuse me, friend. Mind pointing out the difference, aside from the paint job?”

I stalked off without replying.

Jack Eddy followed me into the house, grinning as he settled in the parlor with the home edition of the Times-Press. Mr. Reimer came in and carefully eased down on the opposite end of the couch on which I was sitting. “Have an interesting day at work, Abraham?” he asked.

“Not until a couple of hours ago.”

“Oh? What happened then?”

“A murder out on the south end of town. A lawyer named Kenneth DeRidder.”

Jack Eddy lowered his paper. “What was that? Is this one of your jokes?”

“No joke. I tried calling you but you were out.”

Jack startled Mr. Reimer by bringing his fist down hard on the arm of his chair. “This is a fine kettle of fish!”

One thing about Jack Eddy, he had an unlimited supply of timeworn phrases at his command. As he jumped up and went to the phone, I wondered if his way of speaking fit in with his burning ambition. He was determined to rise to the top at all costs, but would his glib tongue and flippant manner favorably impress the big brass at Wellington’s New York headquarters? Perhaps. As Jack might put it, to men in their line of work, actions would speak louder than words.

After a supper of Mrs. Bauer’s superb corned beef hash I drove Jack Eddy downtown. Not before everyone went outside and pretended to admire my new car. Everyone aside from Bus Bauer, who grunted contemptuously and said, “Another Chevy!” before going back in the house. You didn’t have to have much upstairs to see the others were unimpressed. Only Mr. Reimer seemed sincere in saying I had made a wise choice.

“Well, buddy,” said Jack as we neared the police station, “I’ll say this much, it runs better than your old clunker. Sounds better, too.”

I was hoping it would be a quick trip so I could pick up Sue Baney and take a spin around town. That didn’t seem promising when we were told that Plato Largis, the detective in charge of the murder investigation, had returned to the scene of the crime. Then it began snowing again as we drove south on Brown Street.

We fast-talked our way past a young cop at the door of the apartment. Plato Largis grimaced when he saw us coming. “Not you two again.” He took a cigar from his shirt pocket, an El Verso so dark it looked like a fat stick of licorice, but thought better of the idea and put it back again. “Be a sport, Eddy,” he said, “and tell me you’re not tied in some way with this case. Just once I’d like to wrap up a job without laying eyes on you.”

Jack gave him a smart-guy grin. “Wouldn’t want you getting complacent, Plato. This DeRidder kid was supposed to testify for a client of mine, so I’m curious when somebody slaps a seal on his lips.”

“Beverly Keeler’s your client?”

“You called it, pal.”

“That young lady may need all the help she can get.”

“I want to be there when you talk to her.”

“You know something funny, Eddy? I had you down in my book as a shamus, not a lawyer. When did you pass the bar?”

“Come off it, Plato. She’s been set up from the word go, so I want to be dealt in on the game.”

A cat-that-swallowed-the-ca-nary smile came over Largis’s face. “Even if I operated that way, you’re about an hour too late. The coroner’s preliminary report says DeRidder died sometime between midnight and three in the morning. Beverly Keeler claims she went to bed a little after eleven. Alone.”

“So did I,” said Jack. “Does that make me a suspect?”

“Probably not, unless I find out DeRidder was scheduled to testify for you, too.”

Aside from background information on the victim there was nothing new on the murder in the morning. Kenneth DeRidder had grown up in Cadiz, a small town among the coal fields that had been Clark Gable’s home before he came to Akron for a job in the rubber shops. DeRidder would have been a kid in knee pants at the time Gable set out to see what lay beyond the hills and hollows of east central Ohio. The young lawyer had followed a different route to Akron and met a different fate when he arrived. After four years at Muskingum College came a couple in law school at The Ohio State University. All a waste as it turned out.

Jack Eddy phoned while I was in the middle of a different story with first-edition deadline approaching. “Guess where Damokura was when DeRidder got it?” he said.

“I’m on deadline, Jack.”

“Can you believe another of those all-night poker games? He and Spangler have more in common than I realized. This one was at the Anthony Wayne Hotel with a judge, a deputy prosecutor, and some big jamoke from your own newspaper. Started about eight and didn’t break up until dawn.”

Ben Goldsmith’s eyes were on me so I kept typing. Even so he left the city desk and came over to stand with one hand on the sheet of paper in my Remington. “I’m about to wrap it up, Ben,” I said.

Jack took the hint. “Lunch at Tommie’s?”

I said, “Okay,” and dropped the earpiece on its hook. Goldsmith pulled the copy paper from my typewriter and I inserted a fresh sheet. He took hold of the top corner of that one and said, “Four minutes, Geary.”

While easing down onto the stool next to Jack at Ptomaine Tommie’s I said, “You think that because of Damokura Jerry Lynch had a hand in DeRidder’s murder?”

“You can bank on it, buddy. Lynch wouldn’t have pulled it off himself. It’s stuff like that he’s got Victor Reiner around for. Along with running Lynch’s policy bank, Reiner handles most of the strong-arm stuff.”

“I can’t figure the angle.”

“The kid had to have come up with something solid that would have cleared Beverly Keeler and dumped the theft back in Damokura’s lap. What else could it have been?”

“Then it was talking to you that got him killed.”

“Don’t bray like a jackass, friend. Stand back and let the hoods have their way, is that what you’re saying?”

“I guess not, but none of it’s clear to me, Jack.”

“Damokura’s all mouth, you saw that. Nothing behind it. Give Plato Largis and his boys an hour to work him over and you’d hear him singing all the way to Youngstown. Lynch was making sure Largis doesn’t get that hour.”

“Why not silence Damokura instead of DeRidder if he knows something that could hurt Lynch’s operation?”

“Dead men don’t pay debts, buddy. That twenty grand was probably just a down payment. Damokura’s a compulsive gambler, so he’s a long-term client in Lynch’s eyes, a steady source of income. Along with that, he probably makes a good mouthpiece when one of Lynch’s boys needs one.”

“All this is supposition on your part, right?”

“At the moment, maybe. I’ll have the pieces put together in a day or two.”

“Aren’t you the guy who told me always to approach a story with an open mind?”

“This is a case, buddy, not a story. It must have been Goldsmith who said it. Either way it’s good advice, but that doesn’t mean you don’t use the little gray cells.”

“Been reading Agatha Christie again, haven’t you?”

“Only when I run out of Cain and Gardner. Why?”

“No reason, Jack. Just forget it.”

My wallet being somewhat on the thin side, I checked to see what was playing at the second-run theaters. Sue Baney was fussing with a saucy little hat she felt wasn’t fixed at the most becoming angle. I looked up from the paper and said, “Forty Naughty Girls at the Rialto sounds pretty good.”

“You can forget that one, Bram.”

“Okay, how about Marihuana at the State? It says ‘a lovely girl made hard and brittle by a weed with roots in hell.’ Whaddya think?”

“I think you’re trying to make me mad. I told you the other night I want to see the Ted Lewis band, remember?”

I did, but was hoping she wouldn’t. The stage production plus movie at the Keith-Albee Palace was the most expensive show in town. “Aw, Sue,” I said, “Ted Lewis has the corniest act going. He makes Lombardo and Sammy Kaye sound like real swingers. Besides, the movie sounds lousy.”

Sue’s hat was finally right, but the ends of her mouth had turned down. “Oh, Bram, I really want to.”

I felt like shouting, “No!” when Ted Lewis strolled out on stage, the old top hat that was his trademark cocked over one eye, and cried, “Is everybody happy?” But the show turned out to be great, and there were a few good jazz men in the band, which came as a pleasant surprise. I had forgotten what the evening was costing me by the time we got to the capper, Lewis climbing a stairway with a lone spotlight on him, top hat in hand while he half sang, half talked his way through “Me and My Shadow.”

For me, though, the high point had come earlier in the show. As Ted Lewis sang “When My Baby Smiles at Me,” Sue Baney squeezed my hand and gave me one of her pixieish smiles.

Enough silver remained in my pocket for hamburgers at the Kewpee Hotel, which was a lunchroom, not a place to spend the night. As we passed the Metropolitan Building I glanced up and saw a light in Jack Eddy’s office. He was burning the midnight oil.

Jack was on my mind as we ate. Sue snapped me out of my reverie by using a red-painted fingernail to beat a rhythmic tattoo on the tabletop. She was frowning when I looked up. “You know, Bram, it would be nice if when we’re together you didn’t completely forget I’m around.”

“Sorry, Sue. I was thinking about Jack Eddy’s case.”

“I might have known. Maybe the two of you should go steady. What’s he working on that’s so intriguing?”

“It’s all very complicated. You’d never understand.”

“No, of course not. A mere female, what chance would I have?”

“I didn’t mean it that way. What I’m trying to say is — aw, let’s talk about something else.”

Her smile lacked its usual warmth. “What you’re trying to say is that you haven’t the foggiest idea what’s going on but you don’t want to come right out and admit it. So tell me the story. Maybe I’ll fool you and understand perfectly.”

“If you’re really interested. What happened is a man Jack’s been trying to nail for years comes to Akron and sets up a jewel robbery. While he’s in town he meets a girl and gets swept off his feet. It turns out she’s charged with stealing funds from an escrow account the lawyer she used to work for was supposed to have set up for a real estate deal. The money disappeared before it got to the bank. The key witness against her is a young guy just out of law school working at the firm. Are you with me so far?”

“Bram, there’s nothing even remotely complicated about it up to this point.”

“Well, keep your pants... uh, what I mean is just wait a minute and it will be. This jewel thief Spangler is so head-over-heels about the girl that he turns to the best man around to help her out, his old antagonist Jack Eddy. Jack agrees to take the case as long as Spangler stays completely out of it. That’s because he’s trying to hang the jewel robbery on Spangler, see?”

“Of course I see. Get on with the story, just be more careful about the expressions you use.”

“Okay, now here’s where it gets wild. Somebody knocks off DeRidder, the young lawyer, so there goes the key witness against the girl. That—”

“Does this girl have a name? Or, as Jack Eddy would put it, is she just ‘that broad’?”

“Sure she has a name, Beverly Keeler.”

“Is she pretty?”

“She’s okay, I guess, but kind of skinny. Anyway, she’s the chief suspect in the murder, being the only one to gain by it. Now Jack has that to worry about.”

“Then he thinks she’s innocent?”

“He’s sure of it.”

Sue frowned a little. “Bram, you’ve taken a simple set of circumstances and played around with them in your mind until you have no idea what’s going on.”

“Look, smarty pants, how’d you like to be in Jack’s position? On one hand he’s trying to slap a man in jail and on the other he’s trying to keep the guy’s girl out of jail. You can see he’s in a real dilemma, can’t you?”

“Yes, and I love it. And I wish you’d get your mind off what I may or may not be wearing.”

I knew my cheeks were fiery, but Sue was smiling so my heart began beating too fast. I pretended not to have heard her last sentence and said, “Sue, have you forgotten how Jack got you out of a real jam last summer?”

“No, and I haven’t forgotten how many of them he’s gotten you into since then. That’s your fault, really, except that Jack knows how gullible you are and takes advantage of it, which makes him responsible.”

“Gullible? I have a job to do, you know. Thanks to Jack Eddy, I’ve come up with some great stories. That’s all that counts, isn’t it?”

She took my left hand in both of hers and squeezed it. “Oh, Bram, you’re priceless. You really are.”

I was a little put out and thought about pulling my hand free, but Sue Baney was smiling again and she began stroking my arm. I just let things go on that way.

I was comfortably adrift in that nether world that precedes sleep when the brainchild of P. W. Litchfield, the president of Goodyear, jarred me awake again. As a young executive many years earlier, Litchfield had clock towers built at every plant so the employees would never lose sight of the importance of time. The original at Plant One stood a hundred yards from the boardinghouse on Dudley Street. It sounded four melodic notes on the quarter hour, eight on the half and so on until it reached sixteen. Then came sonorous bongs to make everyone in the neighborhood aware of the hour.

During the day and evening the chimes were one small part of life in East Akron, no more noticeable than the noise of traffic on Market Street, the smell of rubber in the air, the black grit crunching underfoot. Not so at midnight. When the dozen strokes of the big clapper shattered the calm, I never failed to remember that all was quiet and serene at The Anchorage, Litchfield’s estate far out on Merriman Road.

As usual, I counted every note. As silence fell again I heard soft footsteps on the stairs and the opening of Jack Eddy’s door across the hall. I slipped on a robe and went over. While unbuttoning his shirt Jack managed a weary grin. “What’s new, buddy?”

“That’s what I was going to ask you.”

“Hard to say. One thing, Jerry Lynch is having problems with his numbers bank. I’m not sure how it fits in or even if it does.”

“How’d you find out?”

“Cal Andres buddied up to one of Lynch’s ticket sellers. Stood for a few rounds, you know the routine. Lynch isn’t getting wiped out, but for a couple of months he’s been paying off on more one- and two-buck tickets than the percentages call for. It’s eating up his profit, but what’s really got him in a stew is that someone may be setting him up for a knockout score.”

“I’ve never paid much attention to the numbers racket, don’t really know how it works.”

“It can vary a little from place to place, but Lynch’s bank is pretty much standard. Like I told you, Victor Reiner handles the day-to-day operation. You can buy tickets in five denominations from ten cents to two dollars. The average factory Joe plays for a dime or a quarter, someone with a heftier income, or a guy who’s a confirmed gambler, goes for a buck or two a day.

“So you pay the seller, then write your three-digit number on a dated and numbered ticket. He gives you the original and turns the carbon in to Reiner before the stock market closes. You can check the winner in a late edition, the last number on the closing figures of industrials, railroads, and utilities in that order.”

He took a December tenth issue of the Times-Press from his bedside table and turned to the business section. “Here,” he said, pointing to columns of figures in agate type, “the winner is 278. For anyone who played it, the payoff is five hundred to one, but the odds against you are twice that.”

“A sucker’s game.”

“Sure, but you’ve got a lot of pigeons out there ready to fly.”

“How could anyone beat the system?”

“There are ways, friend. The only one I’ve run across personally is fixing the numbers. Say a rival bank wants to put Lynch out of business and take over his territory. They get to somebody in the composing room at your paper, have him alter the numbers on a given day. Then they spread the word ahead of time so there’s a heavy play on that number and a killer payoff. That might work some places, but you couldn’t pull it off in northeast Ohio. Too many newspapers.”

“Looks to me like you’re wasting your time, Jack. How could Lynch’s problems have anything to do with Beverly Keeler or Anderson Spangler?”

“Right now I’m not sure. Give me a little time, and maybe I’ll figure a tie-in. To Keeler, I mean, not Spangler. It’s just a hunch, but I seem to smell Damokura in this.”

Despite the holiday slump, Goldsmith kept after me for stories. The police were spinning their wheels on the DeRidder murder; Jack Eddy seemed to be stalled on dead center. Auto accidents on slick streets provided my only material of consequence. Six had died in crashes the previous day, leading Mayor Lee D. Schroy to say that given an additional hundred policemen he would cut the toll in half in 1938. Political puffery, but it kept Goldsmith off my back for one day.

Desperate for a story with some meat to it, I decided to do a little nosing around on my own. As often as not that meant making a fool of myself.

Jerry Lynch’s legitimate business, his front, was the Emerald Laundry and Dry Cleaning. His white trucks decorated with shamrocks were a familiar sight all over town. The plant was in an old building on Bartges Street near the Ohio & Erie Canal south of the Goodrich complex.

Brief snow squalls interspersed with periods of pale sunlight kept a person guessing as I parked half a block away. With my newer but dirtier suit tucked under one arm, I walked to the sign of the shamrock. The customer service area was sticky with heat coming from the plant at the rear. After a middle-aged woman who looked as though she had lost the knack of smiling filled out a work order and handed me the claim ticket I said, “Is Jerry around?”

“Mr. Lynch? Could be back in his office, I guess. He doesn’t check in and out with me, you know.”

Without waiting for an okay I walked around the counter and through a door into a steambath. Sweaty young women, uniformly pale and haggard, were busy at a variety of jobs, none of them pleasant. On the left, middle-aged men in shirtsleeves were doing book-work in cubicles enclosed by glass that did little to keep out the heat. The place would be a real joy in July.

I asked one of the men where I might find Lynch. Without looking up from his ledger he nodded toward a stairway at the rear. They say heat rises, but the second floor was twenty degrees cooler than the first. After passing three closed doors I came to one that wasn’t. Beyond it was a carpeted office where a man sat with one hip on the corner of a mahogany desk. Another stood staring out a window with a view of the bustling, dreary corner of Bartges and Main. When I said, “Mr. Lynch?” he turned, giving me a quick once-over before saying, “Who’re you?”

“Bram Geary, Times-Press.”

A look of disbelief came over Lynch’s round, ruddy face. “A newsie? A newsie poking his nose in here?”

I grinned sheepishly. “It’s our slow time of year, so I was thinking of maybe doing a series on a few local businesses. You know, those that everybody’s familiar with. You can’t be on any street in town for ten minutes without spotting one of your trucks.”

Lynch hesitated, then broke out in a smile. “Sounds like a good idea, kid. Wha’ja say your name is again?”

I repeated it, and he said, “Yeah, I’ve seen your byline. Usually write crime stuff, don’cha?”

“When there’s any of it to write. December is pretty quiet.”

“Okay, so whaddya want to know?”

The man by the desk cleared his throat and said, “Business is fine, Jerry. I don’t think we need any newspaper publicity.”

Lynch gestured toward him. “My associate, Victor Reiner. Look, Vic, I don’t see how it can hurt.”

Aside from his eyes, Reiner could have been any Akron businessman. He wore a blue pin-striped suit and gray spats, the first pair I had seen in several years. He was about six feet tall, three inches shorter than me, which wasn’t as big as I had him pictured. His neatly trimmed blond hair was held down by a product that gave it the look of being shellacked in place. But the eyes, empty of all feeling, belonged on the face of a leopard.

He left his perch and walked to the door. “It’s your decision, Jerry. I think you’re making a mistake.”

When he was gone, Lynch gave a little shrug, smiling wryly. “Vic’s a worrier,” he said, motioning me to a chair. He went to a cabinet and produced a bottle of Irish whisky. “How about somethin’ to cut the dust while we talk?”

Half an hour later I sat drumming my fingers against the steering wheel. Now what was I going to do? If I didn’t write a story about Emerald Laundry, I could be in trouble with the Lynch mob. If I did, the Times-Press business writer, Ted Leipsic, would have fits because I had crossed his beat. Worse than that, Goldsmith might think I didn’t have enough to do and find some additional duties for me.

“I didn’t figure you for pulling a dumb stunt like that, buddy,” said Jack Eddy after a supper of knockwurst and baked beans at the boardinghouse. “What did you hope to gain by talking to Jerry Lynch?”

“Stir things up a little, maybe. If it turns out you’re right, I want to be familiar with his operation.”

“Well, it’s your funeral.” He went to the rack in the hallway and took down his hat and overcoat. “C’mon, we’ve got a date with Stefan Damokura.”

“We do?”

“He’s waiting at the agency right now.”

“You’re kidding.”

“When do I kid about business? Austin and Andres brought him in half an hour ago.”

“Brought him in? My God, Jack, you didn’t strong-arm a lawyer, did you?”

He grinned while tossing my coat to me. “Persuaded, friend.”

Damokura was in Jack’s private office. Cal Andres, leaning back casually in his chair, was keeping him company. The fat lawyer was irate on the surface, shaky beneath the skin. “This’ll cost you, Eddy,” he blustered. “Kidnapping a man off the street’ll put you behind bars.”

Jack draped his suitcoat over the back of a chair, loosened his necktie, and rolled up his sleeves. “Maybe we can share a cell, Steve. A kidnapper and a killer.”

“If you’re talking about DeRidder, I’m alibied.”

“Setting it up for somebody else makes you as guilty as the trigger man, pal. A shyster like you knows that.”

“Look, Eddy—”

“No, chief, you look. You couldn’t wait to get to Vic Reiner after I talked to you the other day. Then the kid did some digging like I told you he would. He confronted you, you yelled for Reiner again, and we all know the rest of the story. What you didn’t know was we had men shagging you every step of the way.”

Jack went to his desk and sat down. After lighting a cigarette he leaned toward Damokura and in a friendlier tone said, “Here’s the setup, Steve. All I’m interested in is getting my client off the hook. You tell the prosecutor it was a mistake on your part, Beverly Keeler had nothing to do with that missing twenty grand, and then you’re on your own.”

Damokura wiped his face with a dirty handkerchief. “And if I don’t?”

“I turn our file over to Plato Largis.” Jack laid his hand on the phone. “As you know, Plato has his little ways of getting people to come across with the truth.”

Damokura waved his hand at the phone. “Hold on a minute. Look, maybe I’ve made some mistakes in my life, but I’m not a killer. Vic Reiner’s a hard man, I knew that, but I swear to God I didn’t think he’d kill the kid. Scare him, sure, after he nosed around and found out what we were doing, but I didn’t figure on anything more than that.”

“Tell me about it, Steve. What exactly did DeRidder find out you and Reiner were doing?”

“Getting ready to take Jerry Lynch’s operation for a ride. I thought you said you knew.”

“I do, but I want to hear it in your own words.” Jack looked at me and winked. It was all bluff, he didn’t know beans.

Damokura wiped his face again. “It wasn’t my idea, it was Vic’s all the way. When I got in too deep, he made me set the Keeler dame up as the patsy, then I turned the money over to Lynch to cover my losses. The next day Reiner came around with this scheme to clean up on the numbers. He didn’t give me any choice but to go along. I mean he had me over a barrel.”

“Keep going, Steve. Explain this scheme to me.”

“Look, Eddy, you know what Vic’ll do if I open my mouth.”

“You’ve already opened it, sport, but have it your own way.” Jack reached for the phone, and again Damokura waved him off.

“Okay, okay. Vic has a hold over someone in the printing business, and he had duplicate rolls of tickets made up. I had some people I know, real down-and-outers, make one- and two-buck plays, then Vic wrote the winning number on the duplicate tickets and turned them in to himself after destroying the originals. Nothing big, just greasing the wheels to break Lynch with a big score. Then he’d take over the operation without getting Lynch’s Irish buddies up in the air. The way he had it figured, Lynch would never be the wiser.”

“Lynch isn’t that big a dummy. You were being set up to take the fall all by yourself. When was this supposed to take place?”

“Next week. Look, Eddy, are you satisfied now?”

“I’ve been satisfied from the start, providing you make that call to the prosecutor and put Beverly Keeler in the clear.” Jack pushed the phone toward Damokura.

“Now? Look, I gotta think this over.”

“Fine. You’ve got thirty seconds, then I call Largis.”

Beverly Keeler joined us at the same table in the New Deal Lunch. I held a chair for her, but she only had eyes for Jack Eddy. She was tied in knots, five feet of anxiety. “What is it?” she asked. “Has something more gone wrong?”

Jack was grinning. “Relax, kiddo. Damokura phoned the prosecutor half an hour ago saying it was all a mistake on his part and you’re in the clear. He’s at headquarters right now making a written statement to that effect.”

Beverly leaned back, exhaling as the color returned to her cheeks.

“That’s wonderful. It’s going to take me a while to realize it’s really over. I can’t thank you enough.”

She turned to me, laying her hand on mine and squeezing a little.

“And you too, Bram. I’ll never forget it.”

I hadn’t done a thing, of course. There was no way I would have said that even if I hadn’t been so choked up I was afraid to trust my voice. Later, as she was leaving, she gave Jack a peck on the cheek. Then she did the same with me, but lightly on the lips.

When she was gone, Jack burst out laughing. “You big lug, pop your eyeballs back in your head and take a gander at the expression on your face. If only Sue Baney could see you now.”

“You’re not funny, Jack.”

“I was never more serious in my life, buddy.”

After beckoning to the waiter for more coffee he said, “Be careful what you write this time, friend.”

Never before had he told me to keep anything under my hat. “I have to write the story, Jack. The whole story.”

“You have to write that Damokura cleared Keeler. He’s not telling the cops anything about Reiner, so what will you hang the rest of it on? If you say you heard about the numbers scam or DeRidder’s murder at the Wellington Agency, I’ll have to deny it, you know that.”

“But—”

“No huts about it, buddy.”

“You mean you’re going to let Victor Reiner get away with murder just because it’s not your case any more?”

“I didn’t say that. We’ll sit back a couple of days and see what develops. If nothing does, I’ll put a bug in Plato Largis’s ear. I don’t think that’ll be necessary.”

Once again Jack Eddy was right. An hour after the Times-Press was on the street the following afternoon a client visiting Damokura’s office found the shady lawyer slumped over his desk just as DeRidder had been slumped over the table at his apartment.

I was at the police station when the report came in and close on Plato Largis’s heels when he arrived at the scene. From a booth downstairs I phoned Jack Eddy. “You’d better get down here fast and tell Largis what Damokura said about Victor Reiner.”

After a short pause, Jack said, “Hold your horses, buddy. Does Largis know you called me?”

“No.”

“Then I’ve got a better idea. Be on the sidewalk out front in ten minutes, and I’ll pick you up.”

Before I could argue the point, he had hung up. By the time his Auburn pulled to the curb I thought I had it figured out for myself. The prospect didn’t please me.

As he circled the block and headed south I said, “This is crazy, Jack. Let Plato handle it.”

“I intend to — in time.”

“What are you planning, another gunfight at the O.K. Corral with you playing Wyatt Earp? If so, count me out.”

“You think we’re going to pay a call on Vic Reiner?”

“Aren’t we?”

“That’s loony, friend. We’re on our way to see Jerry Lynch.”

“And Reiner’ll be there.”

“He’s busy collecting the day’s loot from his ticket sellers. I checked after you called. Lynch is alone and expecting us.”

Jack Eddy did the talking, Jerry Lynch the listening. He didn’t even inquire about my story on Emerald Laundry. Of Jack he asked a single question: “When are you telling this to the cops?”

Jack glanced at his watch. “I’ve got a couple of things to wind up before quitting time, so I guess it’ll be morning.”

“Fine,” said Lynch. As I closed the door behind us he was reaching for the telephone.

Ben Goldsmith was excited over my story. This time it was the entire story, or at least most of it. Goldsmith gloated when he saw the Beacon Journal’s and found it lacked the details in mine. The fact that Victor Reiner hadn’t been picked up for questioning made it all the better in his eyes. More suspenseful, he said, and good for another story.

He grew increasingly impatient, though, as the days slipped by without the police finding Reiner. They say a reporter is only as good as his last story, and Goldsmith soon tired of reading those of mine saying the manhunt was continuing.

“People are getting sick of this stuff,” he said after skimming over my latest before tossing it aside. “I want something fresh.”

Look, Ben, I write the stories, I don’t make them. That was the thought in my mind. I kept it to myself, naturally.

In desperation I went back to see Jerry Lynch. His numbers bank, closed the day Reiner vanished, was still shut down. It would remain that way until things cooled off.

When I asked about Reiner, he gave me the answer I expected: a blank look, a meaningful shrug with arms thrust out, palms upward. Again he didn’t ask about the story on Emerald Laundry, but as I had my hand on the doorknob to leave he said, “Do much swimming, kid?”

I turned my head and found him smirking.

“Some,” I said.

“Come summer, stay away from Summit Beach. They say the lake’s polluted.”

“Do?” said Jack Eddy. “What can you do? Lynch was having you on. I don’t doubt for a minute that Reiner is wearing cement shoes and keeping company with the fishes, but if there’s one place you can be sure of not finding his body, it’s Summit Lake.”

“It’s frustrating, Jack. It makes me feel like a sap.”

“Then think how you’ll feel if you talk Plato Largis into dragging the lake and all he comes up with are old tires and tin cans.”

He gave me a poke on the arm, laughing at my long face. “Just forget about it, buddy. Going to the wedding?”

“What wedding?”

“Haven’t you heard? Spangler and Beverly Keeler are getting hitched tomorrow. He asked me to be best man. Talk about guts. Wouldn’t that look great on my agency record?”

Perhaps it shouldn’t have, but the news left me stunned. The idea of a sweet girl like Beverly married to a thief didn’t seem right. I convinced myself that my feelings had nothing to do with envy, and certainly not jealousy. For an instant the thought of trying to stop the wedding crossed my mind, then was quickly discarded. It was Sue Baney, not Beverly Keeler, who mattered in my life.

Rather than commenting on it, I went back to the original subject. “Jack, I still don’t understand why you didn’t let Plato Largis handle Reiner instead of tipping off Lynch.”

“What could Largis have done? There wasn’t any solid evidence to tie Reiner to either murder and never would be. Once the heat was off, Reiner would have started looking around for somebody else to help clean out Lynch’s operation and no telling where that would have led.”

For a while I sat quietly in a corner of Jack’s office while he finished whatever he was doing.

Of the two cases, the jewel robbery and Beverly Keeler’s, Jack had zeroed in on the one of greater importance. Beverly, totally innocent of any wrongdoing, was no longer in danger of serving a prison sentence.

Victor Reiner had killed people in cold blood, but the law couldn’t touch him. Perhaps Jack Eddy’s way was best. Jerry Lynch took money from suckers, but if he were gone, someone else would move in and do the job.

Anderson Spangler was a different breed. He belonged in jail, but he didn’t leave dead bodies behind. His real victims were insurance companies.

If Beverly Keeler’s case hadn’t come along, would Jack have done more on the jewel robbery? But what, for instance?

In the outer office a radio was softly playing Tommy Dorsey’s “Once in a While,” the top tune on that week’s Hit Parade. I looked up suddenly and said, “Will you?”

“Huh?”

“Once in a while will you give one little thought to Anderson Spangler?”

“What brought that on?”

“Admit it, Jack, he outfoxed you again.”

For a moment he scowled at me, then switched to a grin. “So maybe Spangler won another round. That doesn’t mean the fight’s over.”

“If you nail him someday, it’ll make his bride happy, won’t it?”

“His problem, not mine.”

“It really steams me, Jack. Either you or the cops should have done something about him before now.”

He leaned back in his chair, hands locked behind his head, contemplating the ceiling. When he looked toward me again, he said, “You’re halfway intelligent, Bram, and thanks to your job, you know your way around a police station. How many times would you say Plato Largis or any other cop in the country knows exactly how a job was pulled and could name every man involved, yet can’t do a thing about it? We both know it happens all the time. When they say crime doesn’t pay, they’re talking about the dummies.”

“That’s not very satisfying.” After a moment I grudgingly added, “Okay, I suppose you’re right.”

“You know I’m right. Even if we caught Spangler’s boys in the act, they’d clam up tight. He wouldn’t work with a squealer. Sure, we could put a man on him and know his every move, but so what? He might hit a place next week or maybe it’ll be a year. So he goes into fifty jewelry stores, noses around, and maybe even buys something. What do we do, stake out every one of them indefinitely? Then when one gets hit he’ll be a hundred miles away with an airtight alibi.”

“In other words he’ll go on thumbing his nose at you and the agency until the day he dies.”

“Maybe, maybe not. Remember that ball game we went to up in Cleveland when the Yankees were in town last summer? Lyn Larry was at shortstop for the Indians, a guy who handles ninety-six out of a hundred chances and makes it look easy. So DiMaggio tops the ball and hits an easy roller out to Larry, but at the last second it takes a funny little hop and bounces off his glove because he was nonchalanting it, just going through the same old motions. Sometimes you can be too good for your own good.”

I thought about it, finally conceding that he was right. “You know,” I said, “if Spangler hadn’t come to Akron with larceny in mind, none of the rest of it would have happened. Does that make him the white knight?”

“It’s okay by me if that’ll help you wrap it up in a neat package. You know what your problem is, buddy? It’s your job. You go out in the morning and dig up a few stories, go back and write them and that’s it. The next day you start over with a clean slate. Everything nice and tidy. That’s not the way it is in the real world, but you expect it to be.”

“It’s not that simple, Jack. A lot of stories carry over.”

“No, they don’t, they just give you a starting point for the next day. Then when all the empty space on those pages is filled up and the presses start to roll, the editors and reporters sit back and say, well, we did it again. Here it is, Akron, everything you need to know in forty-eight pages. Not an empty inch to leave you wondering what’s missing.”

Getting out a newspaper was more complex than that, yet there was a good deal of truth in what he said. Rather than arguing the point I said, “Can you give me a lift home?”

“Where’s your car?”

“I had to drop it off at the shop. They say it needs a valve job, but since I just bought it, I’ll get a twenty percent discount.”

When he wanted it that way, Jack Eddy’s laugh could be downright nasty.