Ellery Queen’s Anthology. Volume 12, 1967

Richard Deming Open File

Richard Deming once spent two weeks in St. Louis soaking in background on local police and court procedures for a novel he was then writing. Among those he spoke to for information and local color was the chief of the Homicide Squad, who had some interesting things to say on one of his favorite subjects — the vast difference between real-life murder investigations and the Hollywood versions thereof.

Many real-life homicides, the chief pointed out, contain no mystery whatever. For example: during a domestic quarrel a husband kills his wife with the blunt instrument nearest at hand. For two hours the neighbors have had ringside seats to the battle of the sexes, and when the police arrive, the husband is still in a daze, and still clutching the murder weapon. And, of course, there are witnesses galore.

Or, say, a wife shoots her husband, immediately phones the police, and announces what she has done — just as simple and conclusive as that.

In neither instance are the police required to solve anything: their job is merely to round up and question the witnesses, and gather the plentiful evidence that the circuit attorney will use in court to prove what everybody already knows.

On the other hand, when a “mysterious” homicide did occur in real life, it usually contained an impossible amount of mystery — far more than any fiction writer would dare put on paper. To illustrate: during a store holdup the bandit loses his head and kills a customer who walked in unexpectedly. The bandit is masked, of average height, and has no unusual characteristics — no limp or odd manner of talking or readily identifiable clothes. He never before saw the person he killed, so that a check of the victim’s background is obviously useless. The only clue is the bullet, and as so often happens in real life, the slug struck a bone and is too battered to provide comparison tests — even if the murder gun does eventually turn up. The case is all mystery from start to finish — and no lead goes anywhere except to a dead end.

The chief of the Homicide Squad believed that no fictional or movie sleuth, however brilliant, could solve this type of crime — and by extension, no TV ’tec could perform such a miracle. Unless the bandit is caught for another crime and in the course of interrogation reveals his guilt of earlier crimes (a rather common occurrence in real life, yet paradoxically seldom used in fiction because it is too “unrealistic”), the case would simply languish in the Open File, which in every big city is likely to be a file cabinet full of folders labeled Unsolved Cases. But the chief of the Homicide Squad assured Mr. Deming that in his honest opinion the generally accepted belief that “murder will out” is mostly a fictional conceit, a popular myth.

It was this research that led Richard Deming to write “Open File,” a novelet that gives an utterly accurate picture of a routine homicide — a run-of-the-mill case told deliberately in a matter-of-fact style. No sensationalism. No pandering to morbid tastes. No thrills merely for the sake of thrills. Just a straight documentary showing how a real-life detective acts in a realistic murder investigation — and with a perfectly realistic ending...

It was a run-of-the-mill case. Check the files of any homicide squad and you will find a hundred like it. Maybe a thousand in the big cities. In St. Louis we stick them in what we call our Open File. I don’t know where they keep them other places, but no matter where they keep them or what they call them, they are run-of-the-mill.

The lieutenant himself took the call when it came in about 11 Wednesday morning, and I drew the case because I happened to return from a hit-and-run just as he hung up.

“Harris!” the lieutenant bawled when he saw me. “Get your butt down to 1046 Eichelberger and see what the hell they got. Some wet-eared rookie from Carondolet Precinct is so excited over the first corpse he ever saw, I can’t make out whether it’s homicide or a natural death.”

“Yes, sir,” I said. “Want I should type up this hit-and-run first?”

“Anybody dead?”

“Not yet. One woman to City Hospital for observation. Maybe internal injuries.”

“Then save it. Dictate it to a stenographer when you get back.”

He howled at his own joke. He howls every time he makes it, which is frequently. The only stenographers we see in Homicide are either dead or have just made somebody dead.

1046 Eichelberger was the lower left flat of a four-family building which had, instead of the usual inside foyer, a box-like open porch with separate entrances to each flat. I didn’t have any trouble spotting it, for besides a squad car with a cop in the driver’s seat half the residents of the South Side were milling around on the lawn trying to peer through the windows.

The door was opened by the rookie who had phoned in, a cop about twenty-two years old who was built like a rhinoceros. He was still agog with excitement, but beneath it I detected a poorly suppressed air of self-importance. Officious, I thought the moment I glimpsed him, an eager beaver with rosy dreams of working his way up to commissioner. Just like me, twenty years ago.

“Lieutenant?” he asked.

“The lieutenant was otherwise engaged,” I said. “He sent his regrets. I’m Corporal Sod Harris.”

“Oh,” he said, let down. He wasn’t only a rookie, but a brand-new rookie. Who but a brand-new rookie would expect the head of the homicide squad himself?

I said, “You can trust me. I been doing this work some years now. Spill it.”

He blinked at me, then moved his oversized body aside to let me in. “I’m Patrolman Fritz Kaltwasser,” he said, then repeated it to make sure I got the name. Who knows? — even a corporal’s report might be seen by some division head on the lookout for sharp young men. “It’s a girl named Eleanor Vogel, Corporal. She’s in the bedroom.” He added with a touch of pride, “I sent her folks upstairs by the neighbors, so they wouldn’t mess up any evidence.”

By the neighbors, I thought. A South Side Dutchman. South St. Louis idiom is wonderful. “Let’s go by the show, ain’t it?” they say, meaning, “Let’s go to the show, shall we?”

Fritz Kaltwasser is German for Frederick Coldwater.

I succumbed to an impulse to heckle him. “The parents under guard?”

“Huh?” He looked at me blankly, then blushed a furious red. “But they couldn’t have... I mean, their own daughter.”

“I was kidding,” I said, relenting. “Let’s see the stiff.”

He winced. He didn’t like the thought of a South Side girl being called a stiff, even after she was one. Maybe I should have said “remains.”

The girl in the flat’s only bedroom had been about nineteen. She was black-haired, passably pretty, possibly even exceedingly pretty in life, if her face had possessed any animation. It didn’t possess any now.

She was over in the far corner in a half-sprawled, half-seated position, her back against the wall, one leg straight out and one bent under her. She was dressed only in a slip and stockings, and between a rather prominent pair of breasts a lot of blood had coagulated. She looked straight at us from sightless eyes.

In her lap lay an Army .45 automatic, and in the wall behind her were three holes which looked as though they might have been made by shots from the gun.

Although he must have looked at her before, Patrolman Fritz Kaltwasser was staring at the corpse from bulging eyes and his face was a light shade of green. I took his elbow and piloted him back to the front room before he threw up.

“Give me the story,” I said.

Gradually his color returned to its usual ruddiness. He pulled a flat notebook from his hip pocket.

“At 10:56 A.M.,” he said, reading, “Patrolman John Lieber and I were cruising west on Bates between Thirty-seventh and Dewey when we got a radio report...”

“Not that,” I interrupted. “Just what happened here.”

Reluctantly he closed the book. “Well, from what I could gather, she must have been shot about 10. She was alone in the house. Her mother and father were shopping over by Grand Avenue, and there was nobody but the girl here when they left at 9. A half dozen neighbors heard the shots. Four or five of them — shots, I mean. A lot of people stuck their heads out back to ask each other what it was, but nobody seemed to knew. The lady upstairs thought it sounded from down here, but she thought nobody was home. She saw the parents go out, see, and she thought the girl was at work. She would have been ordinarily, but her folks tell me she lost her job yesterday. The father and mother found her when they came back at 10:30.”

I asked, “Anybody have guesses about who did it?”

He shook his head. “None of the neighbors anyway. I didn’t ask the parents much, because they’re all to pieces. Could it be suicide? I mean, the gun in her lap...”

“Don’t rush me,” I said. “A doctor seen her?”

“Dr. Koenig, the family physician. He’s upstairs with the parents now. I told him not to disturb the body beyond what was necessary to make sure she was dead until after the medical examiner saw her.”

I stared at him. He expected a medical examiner to rush to the scene of the crime, like they do in the movies. Our coroner’s physician has two assistants, and they do their examining without ever leaving the morgue. Why the movies do it differently, I don’t know. What our coroner’s physician could find out at the scene of a crime that he couldn’t find out quicker in his modern autopsy room, I do know. Nothing.

I said, “Go get that doctor.”

As he started to leave, I walked over in the corner to pick up the phone.

“Hey!” he said. “Fingerprints.”

On the phone, he meant. In the movies you pick up a phone with a handkerchief. Of course, a handkerchief would smear fingerprints as much as your hand, but the movies don’t know that.

“Yeah, fingerprints,” I snarled at him. “And footprints. How come you let that mob of people out front trample possible footprints?”

He looked as though I had kicked him in the stomach. Then, as he started determinedly toward the front door, I said, “Don’t chase them away. Just ask those who know anything about this to stick around. Get their names and addresses while you’re asking them.”

“Yes, sir,” he said. Sir to a corporal.

I lifted the phone by its mouthpiece so as not to disturb the possibly precious prints on the place you would normally hold it. I once heard of a case cracked by fingerprints. It was an extortion case, not a homicide, but still you never know.

Wiggans answered at Homicide. “The lieutenant is out on the street,” he said. The lieutenant is never out on a case, or looking at bodies in the morgue next door, or over in court. He’s always “out on the street.”

“I got a probable,” I said. “1046 Eichelberger. Left-hand flat downstairs. I’ll need pictures, lab stuff, an ambulance.”

“Check,” Wiggans said. “You phone the circuit attorney’s office?”

“You phone it,” I said. “You’re closer.”

Fritz Kaltwasser came back trailed by a tall elderly man. Dr. Herman Koenig his name was, and he said he had known Eleanor Vogel all her life. Delivered her, as a matter of fact, in the same bedroom where she died.

“There isn’t much I can tell you, Corporal,” he said. “Mr. Vogel called me, and after I looked at the girl, I called the police. The only pertinent information I have is she is dead.”

“Ten o’clock jibe as the time of death?” I asked.

“I saw her about a quarter of 11,” the doctor said. “There’s a bullet through her heart, so she must have died instantly, and she hadn’t been dead long. I understand shots were heard about 10. There’s no way of telling any closer than that when she died.”

“Only one bullet in her?”

“I only noted one wound.”

I asked, “Move her any when you examined her?”

He shook his head. “I merely felt her pulse and listened for her heart before I called the police. After they arrived I didn’t touch her again because Fritz told me not to disturb her position.”

Fritz. He knew the young cop too. Probably delivered him. Everybody on the South Side knows everybody else.

I asked him if he had any ideas about the girl’s death, but he didn’t. I also asked him if he knew anything about her personally, whether she ran around, had boy friends, and so on. He didn’t know that either. She was just a kid he had delivered, doctored through measles and other childhood diseases, but whom in recent years he saw only when she was sick.

I said, “Thanks, Doctor. Guess you won’t have to hang around any longer.” I wrote his name and address in my notebook.

Papa Vogel was a retired railroad man, a short stout individual with a tobacco-stained mustache and a curved pipe he never took out of his mouth. Ordinarily he probably was a pretty stolid person, but now he was in a crushed daze. Mama Vogel was a female version of Papa, without the mustache and pipe. She had been hysterical, but by the time I got to her she had settled down to a kind of hopeless grief.

Papa kept ineffectually trying to comfort her by patting her shoulder every once in a while and saying, “Now, Mama,” but it didn’t accomplish anything. She kept repeating, “Oh, Papa,” every time he patted, until the repetitious dialogue began to get on my nerves. But you can’t tell a couple of parents who have just lost their only daughter to shut up, so I worked in my questions between pats.

Neither parent had any idea as to who could have killed the girl. The possibility of suicide had not even occurred to them in spite of the automatic being found in her lap, and in spite of their having a vague idea it was a gun she had possessed for some time. They cleared this up by explaining she had borrowed either this gun or one similar to it from a boy friend some months back to use as a prop in Cleveland High School’s annual alumni play, in which she had a part. They assumed the gun had been returned, but possibly she had never gotten around to it.

They had little to tell me about the killing which I didn’t already know from Fritz Kaltwasser. From 9 until 10:30 they had been shopping at a group of small stores along Grand Avenue just north of Bates. I had them list the stores and the order in which they visited them.

At 10:30 they returned home and let themselves in by key. They explained that when they left, Eleanor was still in bed, the back door was locked, and they left the front on night lock. It was still on night lock when they returned and the back door was still locked too. Probably they would not have discovered the body immediately had the door to the bedroom not been open, but they had to pass it as they carried their various packages to the kitchen. Consequently they found the girl at once.

Aside from that, all I got from Papa and Mama Vogel was background. Eleanor Vogel had been nineteen, a graduate of Cleveland High School, and had worked as a stenographer for the Sanford Shoe Company until the day before, when she had been let out.

Losing her job had been entirely unexpected, the parents said. Five minutes before quitting time the girl had been called to the main office, handed a check for three days work plus accumulated vacation leave, and told not to come back in the morning. Why she had been so abruptly discharged, she refused to tell her parents, but she had seemed exceedingly bitter about it. They said she had come straight home from work and after briefly informing her parents of what had happened, locked herself in her room and refused to come out.

Ordinarily when she didn’t go out in the evening, Eleanor spent a good deal of time on the phone, her parents said. But last night she had not stirred from her room long enough to call a single friend. At 11 P.M. Mama Vogel had looked in to find her in bed asleep, and when the parents left at 9 A.M. she was still asleep.

The parents knew little about her personal life beyond the fact that her main boy friend until a week ago, when they had parted after a spat of some kind, had been a lad named Arthur Blake, the same one who loaned her the gun. Probably the spat had been because of jealousy on Arthur’s part, they guessed, as Eleanor had been quite popular with other men. With rather pitiful pride Mama Vogel said her daughter had a date nearly every night, but when I asked for a list of names, she reluctantly admitted the only one she had ever met was Arthur Blake. When Eleanor went out with the others she customarily left the house alone and met them at some predesignated spot.

In spite of the apparently clandestine nature of these assignations, both Papa and Mama Vogel insisted with blind parental faith their daughter had been a “good girl.”

I got a further hint of the dead girl’s character when I learned the sole bedroom in the four-room apartment had been hers, the parents using a folding divan in the front room.

“A young girl, she needs her own room,” Mama Vogel said between tears. “We try to do as good by her as we can, even though it ain’t much.”

The neighbors’ opinions, though cautiously expressed, were not as kind to Eleanor as her parents’. The consensus was that the girl was inclined to be wild, as more than once she had been observed being dropped from cars a quarter block from her house by strange men at hours as late as 2 in the morning. One woman — there is at least one such self-righteous and omniscient person in every neighborhood — declared she had always known the girl would come to a bad end. If Eleanor had confined herself to “that nice Arthur Blake,” who at least came to the house like a gentleman, she would still be alive, the woman told me, adding with grim satisfaction that the girl obviously had been murdered by one of the bad lot she went with, who were too sneaky to show their faces.

None of the other neighbors had any theories as to who had shot the girl, or why.

No one had seen anyone enter or leave the Vogel flat while the parents were gone. As leaning out of back windows was the normal method of conversing with neighbors in that neighborhood, everyone had rushed to the rear when the shots sounded, and a dozen people could have walked out the front door without being observed. No witnesses were available from the other side of the street because that was a vacant lot.

Though no one had happened to check a clock at the time, there was general agreement the shots had sounded approximately at 10. On the number of shots I found two schools of thought, one faction insisting there had been four and the other holding out for five. One deaf old lady who lived nearly a block up the street swore there had been more than a dozen, but since she was barely able to hear me when I shouted at her, I discounted her as a reliable witness.

I had finished preliminary questioning when Joe Saltzer arrived with a camera and laboratory kit, and Assistant Circuit Attorney Cass Humphrey showed up right behind him.

I brought Cass up to date before we went into the bedroom. So far I had entered the room only deep enough to get a good look, there being a rule about having a representative of the circuit attorney’s office present before you begin messing with evidence. The Assistant C.A. is supposed to instruct you in the preservation of evidence, which is smart in theory, as the circuit attorney’s office is responsible for presenting the evidence in court. However, when a cop has been ten years on Homicide, like me, and an Assistant C.A. has been out of law school only four months, like Cass Humphrey, it becomes a little ridiculous. Not that I think I’m smarter than Cass. He’s nearly as smart as his father, Senator Jim Humphrey, who always drew straight Es compared to my straight Ms when we attended Soldan High School together. But even a dumb cop is likely to learn more in ten years than a smart lawyer can pick up in four months.

Cass merely watched while I went to work.

First I had Joe Saltzer take pictures from various angles to get a permanent record of everything in the room. Then I had him dust the gun in the girl’s lap for fingerprints.

Contrary to popular belief, you do not leave nice clear fingerprints on every smooth surface you touch. Unless your fingers hit the surface with just the right pressure, and without sliding, you leave only useless smudges. On the corrugated grip of an Army automatic you couldn’t leave a fingerprint even if you tried, but there is always the chance of finding fingerprints where the slide is pulled back to throw a shell in the chamber.

On the slide Joe brought out several beautiful smudges.

This routine time-waster being out of the way, I checked the clip and found four shells missing. A hands and knees search resulted in locating two of the ejected casings under the bed and the other two under the dresser. We found half a thumbprint on one, hopelessly smeared.

Then, for the first time, I gave my attention to the body. Under the slip she wore nothing but a garter belt, and apparently she had been caught in the act of dressing, for only one stocking was snapped. Her fingernails, clipped short in stenographer style, were bright red. I was gratified to note she had used them for scratching, for beneath them she had managed to collect tiny flakes of blood-speckled skin. Carefully I scraped them clean, dropped the scrapings in an envelope, and gave it to Joe.

The girl’s hair was singed in one spot which roughly lined up with one of the holes in the wall behind her, indicating that a bullet had caused the singe. I had another close-up made to show this, as it completely canceled the already unlikely possibility that Eleanor had herself pumped three bullets into the wall, then sat down and put the fourth into herself.

On both upper arms the girl had light bruises, which looked as though someone had gripped her hard by the biceps. On the back of her left shoulder was another slight bruise and her left elbow was skinned from contact with the wall.

The total picture added up to someone having grasped her by the arms, hurled her into the corner, and having pumped four bullets at her while she sprawled there. He had been a lousy shot, for only one had connected.

An ambulance had arrived from City Hospital by then, and I let them take the body away to the morgue.

Then I went over that bedroom inch by inch. Aside from the marks on the girl and the skin flakes beneath her nails, there was no sign of a struggle. Near the door I found two six-inch black hairs on the rug and preserved them in an envelope. To my naked eye they looked like the girl’s, but the lab could decide definitely.

The top drawer of the dresser had been pulled open about a foot. In its right front corner was a folded silk scarf with an indentation in its center the size of the gun, indicating the automatic probably had lain there a long time. Farther back in the drawer I found an empty spare clip.

The next two drawers yielded nothing but clothing, but the bottom one contained her personal mementoes and keepsakes. Here were old invitations to high school dances and parties, her grade school and high school diplomas, a dried corsage — all the trivia a nineteen-year-old girl might save. But not a single letter. The absence struck me as so odd that I made a note of it in my book. A girl who had dates every night certainly would have a few love letters. And a girl who would save an old dried-up corsage just as certainly would not throw love letters away.

When I asked Mama and Papa Vogel, they had no idea whether their daughter had saved letters or not, but seemed certain she would have kept them nowhere but in her dresser if she had.

At the rear of the bottom drawer, beneath the newspaper lining, I found a little black address book. Riffling through it, I discovered it contained the phone numbers of 26 men, all identified merely by first names plus the first initial of the last name. But through the phone numbers it would be a simple matter to track them down.

I started to drop the book in my pocket, then thought of something and riffled through it again. No one named Arthur was listed, yet until a week ago Arthur Blake had been her “main” boy friend.

Maybe it meant nothing except that Arthur had no phone.

While I was combing the room, Joe Saltzer dug three bullets out of the wall and sealed them in a marked envelope.

When I finished with the bedroom, I had Joe dust the entire flat for fingerprints, including the telephone Fritz Kaltwasser had been so concerned over. He found three prints good enough to photograph, all in the kitchen. But when two proved to be Mama Vogel’s and the third Papa’s, we neglected photographing them. Fingerprints are lovely for identification purposes when a guy who knows how to take them inks a person’s fingers and gently rolls them across a white card. But they aren’t often helpful as clues.

Rookie Fritz Kaltwasser was still hanging around. Observing us packing up shop, he asked, “Aren’t you going to make paraffin tests?”

Joe Saltzer looked at me. I looked at Joe. Then I looked back at the kid.

“Aren’t you and your partner supposed to be riding around in that squad car, son?”

“My partner’s in the car with the radio on,” he said. “There haven’t been any calls.” He stood looking at me inquiringly, waiting for an answer to his question.

“You got any paraffin with you?” I asked Joe.

“Sure,” he said. “It’s part of the kit.”

“Let’s take some paraffin impressions.”

“What the hell for?” he wanted to know.

“Education,” I said. “Nobody educated me when I was a rookie. They made me learn by myself, which is why I’m a corporal instead of commissioner. I want this kid to know about paraffin tests so he can grow up to be commissioner.”

So we took some paraffin impressions. First we tried Papa Vogel, who docilely submitted without having the vaguest idea what we were doing. We lifted a whole flock of carbon particles from his right palm.

Fritz had faith in the paraffin test. He had seen it in the movies, where it conclusively proves whether or not a suspect has fired a gun. The flashback of the gun is supposed to imbed carbon particles in your hand. He looked at Papa Vogel with his eyes round.

“He smokes a pipe,” I disillusioned him. “He uses kitchen matches.”

Mama Vogel gave a positive test too. I didn’t try to explain that one. It could be that she had fired a gun recently. It also could be she forgot to wash her hands after going to the bathroom. Urine is full of carbon particles. Most likely she had used a match to light the kitchen oven.

“Want us to take your impression?” I asked Fritz.

He looked embarrassed. He muttered that he had fired on the range that morning.

I took the impression anyway. It was negative. Apparently he had a nice tight gun which didn’t allow flashbacks.

“The courts don’t accept paraffin tests as evidence any more,” I explained to him. “So we don’t bother to take them. Any other phase of this investigation you think we might have overlooked?”

He mumbled he hadn’t intended to tell us our job. He was only trying to help.

Outside Joe Saltzer said to me, “Hope I never develop into as sour an old man as you. You have to take the kid down quite so hard?”

“Me?” I asked. “I did him a favor. Next homicide he’ll know what he’s doing. Think I wasted all that time educating him just to put a smart kid in his place?”

“Yes,” he said unkindly.

Cass Humphrey, who had not opened his mouth during the investigation, trailed us outside. “What do you think, Sod?” he asked.

“You can rule out any possibility of suicide,” I told him. “I think you can also rule out the killer being a prowler. A day-time prowler in a residential neighborhood like this is unlikely in the first place, and he would have had to pick a night lock to get in. Any prowler smart enough to pick that lock would be too smart to pull a job at 10 in the morning. Besides, I checked the lock and it shows no signs of being tampered with.

“I think the girl knew the killer and let him in the front door. I say the front because she wouldn’t have been likely to relock the back door if she had opened it, but the front would automatically lock itself. I imagine he got her out of bed, as she was still there when the parents left at 9, and she went to the door wearing the pajamas and dressing gown which are now hanging from a hook on the door of her closet. Either she knew the killer intimately enough to dress in front of him, or she left him in another part of the house while she dressed, and he suddenly walked in on her.

“I think the gun came out of her top bureau drawer, and since even her parents didn’t know it was there, it’s hardly likely the killer did. I think she pulled the gun out, probably in self-defense, the killer took it away from her and killed her with it. There was some kind of struggle, because there are marks on her and she scratched him with her nails.”

“Attempted rape, maybe?” Cass asked.

I shrugged. “Possibly. Also possibly a lover’s tiff. Or the girl might have been doing a little blackmail.” I told him my thoughts about finding no letters among the girl’s mementoes.

“You mean there probably were letters and the killer lifted them?”

I shrugged again. “Perhaps she just never saved letters. From the other stuff she kept I have an idea she would, though, all tied up in pink ribbon. Her folks didn’t know of any, but then they didn’t know much of anything about her private affairs.”

“At any rate, we’ve got enough definitely to establish it as homicide, haven’t we?”

I told him if the coroner’s jury managed to return any other verdict in the face of the evidence, we could arrest the foreman, for obviously no one but the murderer would cast a vote for anything but homicide.

Unfortunately the solution of the case was not that simple, for when the coroner’s jury met on Friday as usual, it rendered a verdict of homicide.

In the meantime I began the staggering amount of routine checking you always have to do in a run-of-the-mill case. Much of it was valuable only from the negative point of view that it eliminated remote possibilities, but it all had to be done. A door to door canvas of people in the Vogels’ neighborhood, for instance, on the off-chance some neighbor who had not come forward had glimpsed someone entering or leaving the flat. And checking the stores where the Vogels claimed they were shopping. Though I hadn’t the remotest suspicion that either parent had killed the girl, I couldn’t simply accept their statements they had been gone from the house from 9 to 10:30. All the stores in that particular shopping area are relatively small businesses, and the Vogels were known by sight in all of them. They were remembered every place they had been.

A general pick-up order had been issued for a white man between 30 and 45 with a ruddy complexion, dark brown hair, good general health, and blood type O, who had scratches on his face. This description emanated from the lab, but since I don’t work in the lab, I have no idea how they deduced all that from a couple of flakes of skin.

The order brought in several scratched-up underworld characters, most of whom I didn’t have to bother with because they were eliminated by blood typing. But I wasted half a day on two who came within the proper blood type before discarding both because of unshakable alibis.

I wasted half a day on Arthur Blake too. He was twenty, good-looking in a skinny sort of way, and worked in the shipping department of the Ralston Purina Company.

Factors pointing to his possible guilt were his fight with Eleanor a week before her death and his ownership of the gun found in her lap, which ballistic tests had definitely established as the weapon which killed the girl and fired three other bullets into the wall.

Factors pointing to his innocence were that he had got himself a new girl two days after his fight with Eleanor, indicating the fight had not completely shattered him; that he was too young to fit the lab’s description of the killer, and at the time the girl was shot he was at work in the shipping department alongside a couple of dozen other people.

The gun he had loaned to the girl was a World War II souvenir given him by an older brother, he said. No, it wasn’t registered. Was it supposed to be? No, it had not been loaded when he gave it to her, but he gave her an extra clip with it, and that had been loaded. Why? He didn’t know. The extra clip had been in his drawer with the gun, and he just gave it to her. Why hadn’t he asked for the gun back, particularly when they were breaking up? He didn’t think of it. He hadn’t forgotten it, and meant to get it back eventually, but he just didn’t think of it at the time.

The break-up battle, as Eleanor’s folks guessed, had been over her going out with other men.

“She seemed to get crazier and crazier,” he told me. “In high school she never went out with anybody but me, but this past year — year and a half maybe — she started going out with everybody. All of a sudden she seemed to get the idea no man could resist her, and thought she had to prove it by dating a different man every night.”

“It happens to young girls sometimes,” I said. “Psychologists call it a ‘phase.’ You ever have physical relations with her?”

He looked at me with indignation. “Of course not. She was my girl.”

Fine standard of morality. You don’t violate your girl. Probably he went to prostitutes.

“Think maybe she was being a little loose with these other men? The ones who never came to the house.”

He flushed, started to shake his head, thought better of it and said with an embarrassed air, “How would I know?”

Obviously it was a thought he had deliberately skirted, something he refused to consider possible about his former “girl,” even after she ceased to rate that classification. It occurred to me his suspicion she was being promiscuous with other men while he continued to treat her as chaste might have a lot to do with his quick recovery after the final split. Some guys have to respect a woman in order to love her.

Apparently he had done a little spying on Eleanor before the blow-off, for he knew her dates customarily picked her up a block from her home at the corner of Eichelberger and Grand. He had never managed to glimpse any of them except as vague figures behind the wheels of cars, and knew none of them except one. During their last fight Eleanor defiantly bragged she was going out with her boss, a 40-year-old man with a wife and two children.

I had already discovered the girl’s former boss was one of the 26 men listed in the little black book, for with the cooperation of the telephone company we had attached last names and addresses to the listing. By then I also had the post mortem report.

It showed that Eleanor Vogel had been pregnant.

The addition of even hearsay evidence that she had been dating her boss gave me pretty good ammunition with which to call on the man.

Warren Phillips was a minor executive for the Sanford Shoe Company. He was a slim, ungrayed man of natty appearance with a nice smile and a cheerful manner. He had his own office, but it was merely a partitioned recess in a row of a dozen similar offices, fronted with glass so that there was no visual privacy from the main office immediately outside of it.

He greeted me with wary friendliness, waved me to a seat, and said with a show of frankness tempered by just the proper amount of impersonal sadness you exhibit over the death of people you don’t know very well, “I suppose you’ve called about that unfortunate girl whom we let go the day she was killed, Sergeant?”

“Corporal,” I said. “Yeah, Eleanor Vogel. Tell me about her, Mr. Phillips.”

He lifted his hands deprecatingly. “There really isn’t much I can tell, Serg... Corporal. She was assigned as my stenographer about six months ago. I believe she worked here a few months before that in the stenographers’ pool, but I’m not certain. I saw her every day, five days a week, for six months, but I really didn’t know her. She was just someone I gave dictation to.”

“You never saw her outside of office hours?”

“Of course not.”

I tabled that for the moment. “Why was she fired?”

He smiled embarrassedly. “She wasn’t exactly fired, Corporal. She was laid off. And I’m afraid that was my fault. Her work slipped and I asked to be assigned a different girl.”

“You didn’t have her canned because you had made her pregnant and she was raising a fuss, huh?” I asked idly.

His eyes grew big and round. “What... what was that?”

I pulled out Eleanor’s little black book, thumbed it open. “She lists you as ‘Warren P., parenthesis, the boss, two exclamation points, close parentheses. Garfield 8-1942. Call Sunday mornings only.’ When your wife was at church, I presume.”

“That... that’s preposterous!” he said in a strangled voice.

I stretched the truth a little. “Her ex-boyfriend, Arthur Blake, knows of at least one occasion you were out together until after midnight. He’s willing to testify in court.”

“In court?” he squeaked.

I settled back in my chair. “Tell me about it, Mr. Phillips,” I suggested.

So he told me about it. First I had to listen to a plea I have heard many times in my twenty years as a cop — the one about being a married man with children, that a scandal would kill his family and probably lose him his job, that he didn’t care about himself, but couldn’t stand the thought of his family suffering. In twenty years I’ve never run across a selfish pleader — not a single one who ever cares for himself. Back him in a corner and he throws his wife and children at you. Or his mother, if he’s single.

When I grew bored, I told him to shut it off and get to the point.

It had started shortly after Eleanor began working for him, he said. He tried to explain that she had something sensual about her which made men constantly aware of her body. He wasn’t the only one to notice it. She was regarded throughout the office as a “hot number,” and he had taken a little good-natured joshing from the other executives at the time she was assigned to him. He insisted she had made all the advances, throwing out stronger and stronger hints that he appealed to her.

Eventually the inevitable happened. He worked her overtime one evening, took her to dinner afterward, and they ended up in a tourist cabin. He claimed he had taken her out only six times altogether in as many months.

“I wasn’t the only man,” he said in a depressed voice. “She even used to describe to me what she did with other men, though not by name. Apparently she liked men older than herself, for she was proud of the number of middle-aged men she had chasing her. Obviously she confused promiscuity with popularity, for she seemed to be convinced she was the most popular girl who ever lived. The fact that men always picked her up away from her house and never took her anywhere in public didn’t in the least shake this belief. I don’t think she was a nymphomaniac, or even particularly passionate, but she certainly had some kind of psychological twist in her thinking. Even if she wasn’t a nympho, she was definitely man-crazy.”

He paused to throw me what was supposed to be a man-to-man look, but came out merely as an embarrassed cringe, “Under the circumstances can you blame me for my reaction when she announced she was pregnant and insisted I was to blame? Naturally I refused to take responsibility.”

“So you had her fired for even suggesting it,” I remarked.

He looked sheepish. “I didn’t have her fired. I merely asked that she be transferred back to the stenographers’ pool. It’s not my fault the pool was full and the main office laid her off. What else could I do? She was getting so insistent, the situation was impossible.”

“What else could you do?” I repeated. “You could put a bullet through her heart.”

His face turned gray. “You don’t think...,” he whispered. “You don’t think I...”

“Tell me about 10 o’clock Wednesday morning,” I said.

For a long time he simply looked at me. Then he pressed a buzzer and a pretty girl of about twenty rose from a desk in the outer office and came in. I noted there was nothing sensual whatever about this girl.

Phillips introduced her as his new stenographer and told me to ask her anything I wanted. I did, and learned that the morning Eleanor Vogel was murdered, the new stenographer had sat and taken dictation from Warren Phillips from 8:30 until noon without a break.

That ended that lead.

During the next four days I had hauled in every one of the other 25 men listed in Eleanor Vogel’s little book. Not one of them proved younger than 30 and they ranged upward in age to an old roué of 60 who had grown children older than Eleanor. Only five were unmarried.

I listened to bluster and indignation, to outright defiance (temporary) and to groveling pleas not to bring ruin on the innocent heads of wives and children. I listened patiently, and then in each case I reached in and squeezed out what I wanted to hear.

With the exception of the last three names on the book, which apparently had not had time to ripen into intimacy, it was the same old story each time, with variations only in the manner in which they had originally met the girl. In only two cases had the meetings been through legitimate introductions, both occurring at public dances. The others had been pick-ups. Eleanor had managed to get herself picked up in bars, on park benches, in swimming pools, at Forest Park Highlands, and simply while walking along the street.

Also, with variations in terminology, every one of the men described her as Warren Phillips had. Through their words I constructed a picture of the girl which would have fascinated a psychiatrist. It was a picture her parents would have denied with horror, and even Arthur Blake, despite his half-confessed suspicions, probably would have refused to believe.

Through some twisted psychology Eleanor Vogel seemed to think the attention of men older than herself proved her a femme fatale, and she had not only given herself without discrimination to any man above 30, she had literally thrown herself at him. The little black book was the list of her “conquests.”

Perhaps a psychiatrist could have understood the causes behind such a fixation developing out of what seemed to have been a normal childhood, but I made no attempt to figure her out, or to judge her either psychologically or morally. My job was to catch her murderer.

I thought perhaps I was getting somewhere when seven of the men she had listed in her book admitted she had accused them of making her pregnant, with as little luck as she encountered with her boss.

But because of the hour the shooting had occurred, twenty-two of my suspects were able to prove they were at work. The other three proved they were out of town.

I started over again.

Although neither Warren Phillips nor any of the other 25 listed in the book showed evidence of having been scratched, Warren Phillips and twelve of the others fell within the loose description issued by the laboratory. After blood tests were run, the number was reduced to Warren Phillips and two others.

We took skin samples and eliminated everybody.

I started all over again, this time broadening the field of investigation.

From Mama and Papa Vogel I got a list of friends Eleanor had not included in the little black book. High school friends, people she had known at work, boys and girls both. Patiently I hunted them down and asked questions. Did she ever mention being afraid of anyone? Did they know she had a gun at home? Did they know she went with older men? With anyone at all? Who?

Nothing.

I was just getting ready to start over a third time when the lieutenant snarled something about spending my life on a single case and threw two new ones in my lap. So I contented myself with poring over the case record for a final time.

Every bit of evidence it had been possible to collect by modern scientific methods of criminology was there. The beautifully clear photographs, the lab reports, the post mortem report, the copy of the coroner’s inquest, the pages and pages of questions and answers typed up by my two index fingers. Could it be put together and produce an answer by nothing but the addition of human reason?

I took the case record home with me to try it on my own time.

The fact that the gun had been loaded when Eleanor tried to use it, and had it wrested away from her, started a train of thought. Certainly it had not been loaded when used in the alumni play. Would she have kept it loaded afterward? Hardly likely, unless she felt she might have to use it in self-defense against someone later.

It seemed plausible to infer she had been aware of possible danger.

This deduction brought me no nearer a solution than I had been.

Again I concentrated on the already memorized evidence, and out of it I was able to draw some fine general and alternate theories.

Perhaps there was a man with a scratched face somewhere in town who had been one of Eleanor’s conquests, but for some reason she had failed to enter his name in the book. Perhaps the man simply had no phone.

Perhaps the book had nothing to do with her killing. Perhaps the peculiarly absent letters were the key, and she had been killed for their possession.

Perhaps Arthur Blake, or Warren Phillips, or one of the other 25 men in the little black book had hired a professional killer.

Perhaps, after all, it was simply a prowler with a knack for picking locks in broad daylight.

The trouble with every perhaps was that it pointed nowhere at all.

The next morning I took the case back to Homicide and put it in the Open File. It is still there, along with a hundred other cases in the same file. A run-of-the-mill case. A kind of murder every homicide squad gets oftener than it admits. A kind of killing every homicide cop occasionally slaves over — and finally, reluctantly, closes by sticking it in the Open File.

The unsolved homicide.

Editors’ Note: “Open File” is simply a realistic portrayal of a common but generally unpublicized type of homicide case. It is not intended to be one of those puzzle stories in which the reader is challenged to figure out the solution; nor is it intended to be an “unfinished” story in “The Lady, or the Tiger?” tradition, in which the reader is kept in a state of “suspended cerebration,” wondering what happened after the. story ends. Yet there is a puzzle in this story, and if you are the kind of reader who enjoys matching wits with the detective (or the author) you may wish to solve the case for yourself.

Corporal Sod Harris was deliberately permitted to miss an important point in the investigation of Eleanor Vogel’s murder. This overlooked point directs suspicion to one person as the instigator of the murder, if not the actual filler. Had Corporal Harris caught the point, the story’s outcome might easily have remained unchanged — the clue might have led to a dead end. But if you think you are a shrewd and observant amateur detective, try to answer these two questions:

What point did Corporal Sod Harris miss?

And to whom did this clue point?

The point that Corporal Harris missed was simply the significance of the time of the murder. According to the evidence, Eleanor Vogel came straight home after learning she had lost her job and thereafter had no contact with anyone except the murderer. Therefore, the only one of the numerous suspects who would expect the girl to be home at 10 in the morning on a working day was her boss, Warren Phillips.

You will recall that the reason the upstairs neighbor did not investigate the Vogel apartment, even though the neighbor thought the shots came from there, was that she thought no one was at home in the Vogel apartment — the neighbor had seen Eleanor’s parents leave and had every reason to assume that the girl was at work. All of Eleanor Vogel’s lovers — except Warren Phillips — would also have assumed she was at work. None of them — except Warren Phillips — would have picked that particular time to visit the girl or have instructed a professional killer to call at that time.

Yes, the very time of the murder points to the victim’s boss, Warren Phillips, as the possible culprit.