The Second Richard Deming Mystery MEGAPACK™: 23 Classic Mystery Stories

Originally published in Detective Tales, June 1953.

Chapter One

Harry Nolan slipped his key into the Yale lock, looked surprised when it failed to turn, and raised his eyes to the brass numerals over the door. The numerals were one, three and four, just as they had been when he left for work that morning.

Withdrawing the key, he examined it puzzledly, then tried to fit it into the lock upside down. It refused to enter.

Once more he tried it the right way, but when he had no more success than before, withdrew it and dropped it back in his pocket.

The lock must be broken, he thought, trying to decide what to do about it. He left the shop at four-thirty, while Helen, his wife, worked until five, so it was unlikely she was already home, but he rang the bell on the off-chance she had left work early.

To his surprise, the door was opened by a slim, red-haired woman he had never before seen.

An unprejudiced male would have considered the redhead beautiful, or at the very least pretty. But Harry was in the habit of unconsciously appraising every woman he met by the standard of Helen’s fresh sparkle. It took more than surface beauty to match that sparkle; you had to be clean and fresh inside, in love, and sure you were loved in turn. By beauty contest standards the redhead would have surpassed Helen, but all Harry saw was her brittle hardness.

When she looked at him inquiringly, Harry said, with mild bewilderment, “For some reason my key won’t fit. Is Helen home?”

The woman looked puzzled.

“I’m Harry Nolan,” he explained. “Helen’s husband.”

“Helen?” the woman said. “I’m afraid I don’t understand. There’s no Helen Nolan here.”

A man outside Harry’s range of vision called, “Who is it, honey?”

The redhead called back, “Some man looking for his wife, Kurt. Do we know a Helen Nolan?”

Harry began to grow angry. Who these strangers in his apartment were, he had no idea, but he had no intention of continuing to stand in the hall outside of his own home. He started to push by the woman, then stopped in confusion.

The front room was not that of his apartment. Not only were its furnishings entirely different, but the wallpaper was a flowered pink instead of a vertically striped green.

A tall, dark-skinned man seated on the sofa looked up at Harry with a frown, folded the paper he was reading and rose to his feet.

Harry stammered, “I’m... I’m sorry. I thought this was my apartment.”

As he backed through the door, the man crossed to stand next to the woman. He continued to frown at Harry, and now the woman was frowning too. Finally the dark-skinned man shrugged and pushed the door closed in Harry’s face.

Once again Harry looked at the numbers over the door. They still read one, three and four. Checking the doors to either side, he found they were 132 and 136, just as they should have been. Immediately across the hall, as usual, was apartment 135.

Just as his bewilderment started to become tinged with an element of panic, Harry saw the light. He was simply in the wrong building; an understandable error, inasmuch as he and Helen had moved in only a week ago and their apartment house was one of three identical buildings in the same block.

With a relieved but rather embarrassed chuckle at himself. Harry went down the stairs, passed through the front door and studied the gilded number embossed on the glass of the door. Panic jumped within him again when he saw it was 102.

Glancing left, then right, he saw identically solid, red brick apartment houses rising five stories either side of him. Wildly, he turned to study the opposite side of the street. At one end of the block was the same gas station which had been there that morning, at the other end the same drug store. And between them were the same brownstone-front houses which had once been upper middle-class homes, but now were boarding houses.

Harry felt his sanity slipping. Grasping at a straw, he ran to the corner and peered up at the L-shaped street sign. His throat contracted when the sign verified that the corner was Carlton and Fourth.

“Whoa, boy!” Harry told himself. “Let’s pull ourselves together.”

With forced calmness he marshaled facts to convince himself he was not going mad. Last Saturday he and Helen had moved into apartment 134 at 102 Carlton Avenue. It was now Friday, which meant five times he had left apartment 134 at 102 Carlton Avenue to go to work in the morning, and five times had returned after work in the afternoon...

He dismissed the possibility that he had left from and returned to either 10 °Carlton or 104 Carlton, for not only was he certain of the address, he was certain it was the center apartment house. With equal certainty he discarded the possibility that his apartment was 34, 234, 334, or anything but 134. Since he always climbed a single flight of stairs to reach it, it had to be 134.

Glancing at his watch, he saw it was five-fifteen, too late to catch Helen by phone before she left work. Since she would be getting off a bus right where he was standing within another ten minutes, Harry decided to wait for her. The thought that they could tackle the problem together reduced his panic to mere worry.

When Helen failed to alight from the five twenty-five bus, Harry was disappointed. When she was not on the five forty-five, he began to experience unease.

When the five fifty-five passed without even slowing down, a cold chill crept along his spine.

Forcing himself to at least surface calmness, he crossed the street to the gas station, located a pay phone on the wall, and then discovered he had no change in his pockets. He extracted a dollar bill from his wallet — and found that he was all alone.

The station’s single attendant was outside gassing a car. Under the stress of his increasing nervousness, it seemed to Harry the man deliberately moved in slow motion when he finally hung up the hose and began wiping the windshield, though actually he was kept waiting no longer than a minute and a half.

When the attendant finally entered the station, Harry thrust the dollar bill at him and asked for change to include some dimes. To his slight annoyance the attendant gave him ten dimes.

Catching his expression, the man said, “Didn’t you want to play the machine?” For a moment Harry was puzzled, but then he noted the dime slot machine in one corner of the room. In Wright City you found slot machines everywhere: in filling stations, drug stores and even in barber shops. And of course in every tavern.

“Phone.” Harry said briefly.

Fishing from his wallet the slip of paper on which Helen had written the unlisted phone number of her boss, he dropped a dime and dialed the number. It rang several times before a woman’s voice answered, “Hello.” It was not Helen’s voice.

“Is this Mr. Dale Thompson’s office?” Harry asked.

“Yes. His home and his office.” The woman’s voice had a dulled edge, as though she had been crying.

“This is Harry Nolan. Is my wife still there?”

“Who?” the woman asked.

“Helen Nolan. Mr. Thompson’s secretary.”

For a moment there was silence. Then the woman said in a puzzled tone, “I’m afraid I don’t understand. You are speaking to Mr. Thompson’s secretary. My name is Miss Wentworth.”

For a long time the constriction in Harry’s throat refused to let him speak. Finally he got out, “May I speak to Mr. Thompson, please?”

On the other end of the wire there was a silence nearly as long. Then in a muffled tone the woman said, “I’m sorry. Dale... Mr. Thompson had a heart attack this morning. He died at Mercy Hospital at eleven o’clock.”

The shock of it flooded over Harry like an icy stream. Not because of any particular feeling for Thompson, for he had never even met the news columnist. But the announcement of his death was like a closing door to Harry, an abrupt curing off of an avenue of escape from what was gradually assuming the proportions of a nightmare.

He managed to stammer, “I’m awfully sorry to hear that, Miss Wentworth. But you must know my wife, Helen. She has been Mr. Thompson’s secretary for the past two weeks.”

“I’m afraid I don’t even know what you’re talking about,” the woman said with a note of finality. “I’ve been Mr. Thompson’s secretary for more than a year. And under the circumstances, I am hardly in a mood for practical jokes.”

She hung up.

In a daze Harry left the station, crossed the street and entered the building at 102 Carlton for a second time. Resolutely he climbed the stairs, paused in front of apartment 134 and took the Yale key from his pocket.

Nothing in the past hour has really happened, he told himself. I’ve been suffering some kind of mental hallucination. Now I will put the key in the lock, open the door and find Helen with dinner ready, beginning to worry about where I have been.

Sliding the key into the lock, he twisted it so hard it bent slightly. But it would not turn.

He dropped it back in his pocket and rang the bell. The same red-headed woman appeared. When she saw him, she frowned in surprised annoyance, but then she noted the strained paleness of his face and withdrew a step in alarm.

“Pardon me,” Harry said in an even tone. “Would you mind telling me how long you’ve lived in this apartment?”

“Why... why going on four months. Why?”

“Thank you,” Harry said, and walked away.

The night desk sergeant said, nothing for a few moments after Harry finished talking.

Then he said, “You left out one part.”

When Harry only looked puzzled, the desk sergeant said, “The tavern you stopped in on the way home.”

Panic was gripping Harry too tightly for there to be any room in his emotional system for anger. He said patiently, “I haven’t even had a beer in two days. And it wasn’t just the wrong apartment, because I went back to check a second time. Even if it was the wrong place, there’s no explanation for this Miss Wentworth where Helen worked never even hearing of her.”

The desk sergeant drummed his fingers, finally shrugged and said in a tone indicating he was merely humoring a taxpayer, “I’ll let you talk to somebody in the Detective Bureau.”

Lifting his phone, he pushed one of a bank of buttons on its base and asked for a Sergeant Murphree.

“I’ve got an odd one for you, Joe,” he said. “A guy’s lost his wife, but it’s not just a missing person deal. He claims a whole furnished apartment disappeared along with her.”

After a pause he said, “You can get it from the guy. I’ll send him up.”

“Take the elevator to the fourth floor,” he told Harry, after hanging up. “Go left two doors and you’ll find one marked Detective Bureau. Ask for Sergeant Murphree.”

Following directions, Harry reached the door labeled Detective Bureau just as it opened and a thin, cold-faced man stepped out into the hall.

Harry said, “Pardon me, I’m looking for Sergeant Murphree.”

The man glanced at him without interest. “Why?”

The abrupt question disconcerted Harry. “The man downstairs...” his voice stumbled. “On the desk, you know. He sent me.”

“To see me? Okay, shoot.”

“It’s a kind of long story, Sergeant,” Harry said hesitantly.

The sergeant looked pained. Rather grudgingly he said, “My office is next door,” and moved toward it.

Harry followed, his throat experiencing the now familiar constriction when he saw the door they were entering was labeled Homicide Squad. For the first time it occurred to him Helen might be dead.

The room contained approximately a dozen desks arranged in three rows, like in a schoolroom. Only one in the far corner was occupied, and the man seated behind it laboriously typing with two fingers did not even glance up. Waving Harry to a seat next to a desk near the door, the detective sat behind the desk and said resignedly, “Shoot.”

Harry repeated the tale he had told the desk sergeant.

When he finished the detective asked, “What makes you think your wife is dead?”

The question not only startled Harry, it crystallized a host of vague suspicions into a terrible fear. “I... I don’t think that,” he said desperately. “She couldn’t be dead, could she?”

“How would I know?” the detective asked without feeling. “But if you don’t think she is, why did that damn fool on the desk send you to Homicide?”

Harry shook his head miserably. Then the door jerked open and a bull-necked man in plainclothes peered in at them.

“You the guy with the missing apartment?” he demanded of Harry.

Startled, Harry repeated, “Missing apartment? No... missing wife. I mean yes, both of them.”

The seated detective looked at the one in the doorway with unmistakable distaste. Then he looked back at Harry. With a note of exasperation in his voice, he said, “I been wasting my time listening to one of Murphree’s cases. I thought you said Murphy.”

“When did you learn to think?” the bull-necked man growled. “For ten minutes I been cooling my heels waiting for this guy.”

“Tough,” the thin man said with deliberate lack of sympathy. To Harry he said, “This guy is Sergeant Joe Murphree of the Detective Bureau. I’m Sergeant Don Murphy of Homicide. Next time get the mush out of your mouth.”

“I’m sorry,” Harry apologized stumblingly. “I thought... I mean, I didn’t know—”

“Come on next door,” the bull-necked Murphree interrupted irritably.

As they left the office Harry was surprised to see the two detectives exchange glances of profound dislike.

A few moments later Harry was repeating his story for the third time. And this time he was gratified to find he was not met with total skepticism. Not that Sergeant Joe Murphree gave the impression he instantly believed the incredible tale, but neither did he give any indication of disbelief. His questions satisfied Harry he at least was reserving judgment until he had done some investigating.

“You say you got married just a week ago?” Murphree asked. “What was your wife’s maiden name?”

“Helen Lawson.”

“Local girl?”

“No. From Des Moines. We both are. I’ve been here about six weeks, but she only arrived three weeks ago.”

“How’d you happen to move to Wright City?”

“The Ajax people were running a labor recruitment drive,” Harry explained. “They advertised in the Des Moines papers for fit-up men and I applied. They offered fifty cents an hour more than I was making for fit-up work in Des Moines, plus moving expenses, so I grabbed it. After I got settled, I sent for Helen.”

“And right away she got a job as secretary to this Dale Thompson?”

“Well, about a week after she arrived. The Midtown Employment Agency sent her to Mr. Thompson. She was a trained secretary, so she didn’t have to worry about getting some kind of a job after she moved here.”

“Where’d she stay until you got married?” the detective asked.

“I got her a room up the street from mine. Then we looked for an apartment together, and soon as we located one, we got married.”

“Let’s take a little ride,” Sergeant Murphree suggested.

Instead of using a squad car, they went in Murphree’s own automobile, which to Harry’s surprise turned out to be a sleek Mercury convertible. Somehow, the thought of a policeman riding around in a convertible instead of a plain black sedan struck Harry as odd.

The sergeant’s first remark after they climbed into the car struck him as odd, too. Glancing at his watch, Murphree announced it was nearly seven and time to eat.

“Eat?” Harry repeated. “Before we find Helen?”

The bull-necked detective said tolerantly, “Look, kid, according to your story, it’s two hours since you walked into your apartment and found everything different. Whatever it is happened to your wife, another half hour isn’t going to change things. But another half hour without food would change me. I work from four till midnight, and my suppertime is seven to seven-thirty.”

Murphree drove to a moderately expensive restaurant a few blocks from Headquarters where he ordered a complete meal. Though Harry had tasted nothing since noon, he was unable to eat. He ordered a cup of coffee.

In an agony of suspense Harry spent the next half hour watching the big detective leisurely consume his meal. The minute the man finally sipped the last of his coffee and lit a cigarette, Harry grabbed the check and raced for the cashier.

It did not occur to Harry until after they were back in the car that probably there was some regulation forbidding policemen to accept favors from complainants. However, the sergeant made no offer to repay Harry for his dinner, and since Helen was too much on Harry’s mind for him to bother over the expenditure of two and a half dollars, he dismissed the thought.

The red-headed woman and her dark-skinned husband still occupied apartment 134 when Harry and the sergeant arrived at 102 Carlton. After Murphree identified himself as a member of the Detective Bureau, he and Harry were grudgingly invited in.

The sergeant’s questioning revealed the couple were Mr. and Mrs. Kurt Arnold, that the redhead was a professional model and the man a bit actor in the theater. They claimed to have occupied the apartment for the past four months and to have slept there every night during that period except for one weekend they were out of town... and that weekend was nearly a month before Harry and his bride moved in.

“What’s this all about anyway?” the dark-skinned man asked.

“Nolan here is missing a wife,” the detective said vaguely. “Mind if we look around?”

Kurt Arnold and his wife obviously did mind, but they reluctantly gave permission. Puzzled, they followed Harry and the sergeant from room to room as they investigated the whole apartment.

There were only three rooms and a bath to investigate, and except for their layout Harry recognized nothing familiar in any of them. Even the wallpaper was different in every room. It was not until they had again returned to the front room that Harry suddenly recalled an item which might prove, at least to his own satisfaction, that this was the same apartment he had occupied for a week.

“The bathroom window,” he said abruptly. “A triangle about an inch across is missing from the left upper corner. You have to raise the shade all the way to see it.”

With all three of them behind him, he shade cord and allowed it to fly all the way strode back to the bathroom, pulled the up.

The upper window pane was intact.

Sergeant Joe Murphree made no comment as he and Harry Nolan left the apartment. He simply led the way downstairs and rang the manager’s bell.

The apartment manager Harry had never met, as Helen had been the one to locate the apartment and she had also delivered the first month’s rent. It therefore did not upset Harry to have the man look at him without recognition, but when he denied all knowledge of any tenants named Mr. and Mrs. Harry Nolan and verified the Arnold’s story of having occupied apartment 134 for the past four months, a feeling of hopelessness, settled over him.

Sergeant Murphree’s expression indicated he rapidly was losing his objective attitude.

Chapter Two Man Alone

Using the manager’s phone, the sergeant checked Mercy Hospital and learned news columnist Dale Thompson had indeed died of a coronary attack at eleven that morning. He then drove Harry over to the Newbold Arms, where the bachelor columnist had lived alone in a seven-room penthouse which comprised both his home and his office. Though it was by now after eight in the evening, they found the woman Harry had talked to over the phone still there.

Dorothy Wentworth was a tall, efficient-looking brunette. In answer to the detective’s question she explained she did not live in the penthouse and ordinarily would not have been there after five, but because Thompson’s nearest relatives lived in California, there was no one else to take the numerous calls which were coming in as the result of his unexpected death. Dale Thompson had been mildly famous, and already she had received calls from the governor, the mayor, two congressmen and fifteen or twenty other notables who phoned to express condolences. During the ten minutes they spent at the penthouse, two more long distance calls came from friends who had heard the news over the radio.

Dorothy Wentworth could shed no light whatever on the mystery of Helen’s disappearance. She said she had been Dale Thompson’s secretary for more than a year, had never missed a day’s work, and was positive no woman aside from herself had done any secretarial work for the columnist during that period.

On the way down in the elevator Sergeant Murphree said, “Let’s see that paper you mentioned with Thompson’s telephone number on it.”

Digging into his wallet, Harry handed over the paper on which Helen had written the number. After studying it a moment, the detective thrust it into his own wallet.

He asked, “Can you say for certain your wife ever worked for this guy? You ever visit her here during office hours, or call the unlisted number before today?”

Miserably Harry shook his head. “But why would she pretend to have a job she didn’t have? What would be the point?” The elevator emitted them at the ground floor. When they got off, the detective paused for a moment and regarded Harry dubiously.

“Your wife talk much about her work with Thompson?”

“Not about her work,” Harry said. “About him some. She said he was a nice guy to work for. But he made it clear to her before she got the job that he wouldn’t stand for any leaks whatever from his office. He said that until after it was published, she wasn’t to discuss anything at all scheduled to appear in his column, even with me. So she never talked about the stuff she had to type up.”

Murphree said ruminatively, “Maybe that was to cover up that she wasn’t really forking for him at all.”

“That’s just silly,” Harry protested, but in the face of Miss Wentworth’s evidence, he was conscious that his voice lacked conviction.

For the first time it occurred to him Helen might have deliberately disappeared, and the thought upset him nearly as much as when he had faced the possibility that she might be dead.

“Where’s this rooming house where she stayed before you got married?” Murphree asked.

The rooming house was at Second and Clark. Harry experienced a sinking feeling when the woman who came to the door was not Mrs. Swovboda, who had been landlady when Helen moved out.

He inquired tentatively, “Is Mrs. Swovboda in?”

The woman, a plump, matronly person of middle age, said. “Mrs. Swovboda moved to Florida a week ago, after I bought her out.”

Sergeant Murphree showed his badge. “You run this place now, lady?”

“Yes, sir, Mrs. Johansen is the name, Sergeant.”

“You got a register of former guests?”

“Yes, sir. Come in please, and I’ll get it.” She showed them into the same plain but comfortably furnished living room where Harry had sat nearly a month ago when he was arranging a room for Helen. From the top drawer of an old-fashioned desk she took the black loose-leafed notebook in which Harry had entered Helen’s name, and in which behind the entry Mrs. Swovboda had written the date and $10.00 paid.

Watching over the sergeant’s shoulder as the man slowly turned the pages, Harry was not surprised to learn the entry was no longer there.

Handing the notebook back to Mrs. Johansen, the detective asked without much interest, “Any of your roomers in?”

Before the woman could reply, Harry said in a tired voice, “None of them knew her. Hers was the side room with the separate entrance. When she moved out I remember her remarking that in the two weeks she was here, she never even glimpsed any of the other tenants.”

Without looking at Harry, the detective moved toward the door. Just before passing through it, he thanked the landlady rather gruffly, glanced once at Harry in a set-jawed manner and looked away again.

Outside, he climbed behind the wheel of the convertible, waited until Harry was next to him, and then said grimly, “We’ll make one more check.”

Driving a block and a half along Clark, he stopped in front of Harry’s old rooming house. With no hope whatever Harry followed him up the front steps.

He was so surprised when the door was opened by his old landlady, Mrs. Weston, he very nearly grabbed the woman and kissed her. Under ordinary circumstances such a thought would have nauseated him, for not only had he vaguely disliked Mrs. Weston when he roomed at her house, she was sixty, fat and had a mustache. At the moment, however, she looked beautiful to Harry, for at last he could show Sergeant Joe Murphree someone who had actually met Helen and could vouch for her existence.

The woman frowned at Harry and asked, “What’s the matter? Lose your key?”

The question took him aback, but he tabled it for the moment in order to introduce Sergeant Murphree. “Tell the sergeant about Helen, Mrs. Weston,” he said eagerly. “You remember. The girl I brought here once and told you I was going to marry.”

“Helen?” the woman asked in a doubtful tone. “Did you bring a Helen here?” To the sergeant she said, “I got twelve young men, and they’re always bringing their girls around for me to meet. Makes it hard to remember.”

“Yeah,” the bull-necked detective said disgustedly. “This guy lived here until a week ago, did he?”

Mrs. Weston looked surprised. “Until a week ago? He still does.”

Harry gazed at her with his mouth open. Sergeant Murphree glared at him, then asked Mrs. Weston in a stiff voice, “Mind if I look around his room for a minute?”

The landlady looked him over doubtfully, frowned at Harry and then apparently decided to cooperate with the police without asking questions. She led them up a flight of stairs to Harry’s old room. Harry gazed at the blank door in dread, almost knowing in advance what was on the other side.

“Gimme that key you claimed was to the apartment,” Sergeant Murphree said, holding out his hand.

Numbly, Harry handed it over. It slipped into the lock easily, and when the sergeant turned it, the door opened. Sergeant Murphree stepped aside, laid his hand on Harry’s shoulder and gently propelled him into the room first.

Harry felt no shock at what he saw, for by now his nerves were anesthetized to shock. A numbness almost approaching indifference had replaced his emotions, and he felt nothing whatever when he saw his own books on the table by the window, his alarm clock and table model radio on the bedside stand, and through the open door of the closet a rack containing his own neckties.

The thought flickered across his mind that somehow he had slipped back in time. In science-fiction stories he had read of “time faults” through which a person could accidently slip and find himself suddenly either in the future or the past. He had never heard of such a thing actually happening, and had never regarded time faults as anything but the stuff of fantasy, but how else could he explain what had happened? Perhaps Helen was still safe in Des Moines and they were not even married yet.”

He turned to look into Sergeant Murphree’s face, finding nothing there but the resigned bitterness of a cop who is long inured to spending much of his time chasing wild geese.

He asked eagerly, “What’s the date today?”

The expression on the sergeant’s face caused his eagerness to die. The man thinks I’m mad, he thought.

At the same time a matter occurred to him which shattered the time fault theory to dust. Dale Thompson had died that morning, which automatically proved he had not slipped back a few weeks in time, for once dead, the man could hardly come alive again weeks later and hire Helen as his secretary.

I am mad, he thought with an odd sense of relief. I haven’t lost Helen because I never had her. I imagined her arrival in Wright City, the apartment, our marriage, everything.

With the detached sense of standing to one side and hearing another person speak, he heard himself saying, “I guess it was all a mistake, Sergeant. Sorry to have troubled you.”

The detective’s face had flushed a dark red. He growled, “What you need is a little psychiatric treatment, Bub. You bring another wild story to Headquarters and you’ll find yourself in the observation ward at City Hospital!”

He strode out of the room and clumped down the stairs without even saying good-by to Mrs. Weston. The landlady regarded Harry strangely for a moment.

“What’s this all about, Mr. Nolan?” she asked finally. “You in some kind of trouble with the police?”

Harry shook his head at her.

“Well, I wouldn’t want a roomer in trouble with the police,” she said. “I’ll have to ask for your room if there’s any more of this kind of goings on.”

Harry merely gave her a trancelike nod. After the woman left, closing the door behind her, he stood in the center of the room for a long time without moving.

Finally, for want of anything else to do, he undressed and went to bed.

Though he almost immediately fell into an exhausted sleep, Harry did not spend a restful night. A recurrent nightmare of chasing Helen along labyrinthine corridors while Sergeant Joe Murphree held him back by the coat tails and Mrs. Weston stood on the sidelines laughing uproariously, awoke him time after time.

His periods of wakefulness were more restful than what sleep he got, for then he could lie still with a deliberately blanked mind and think of nothing. Sleep was merely a half-conscious coma in which agonized fears rose, from his subconscious to torment him.

At seven in the morning he abruptly awoke from a dream in which Helen, for the hundredth time, had just disappeared down a dim side corridor. Physically he was as exhausted as when he had fallen into bed, but he was startled to find his mental processes suddenly clear.

Last night he had gone to bed convinced he was mad, that his marriage to Helen, their week together in the apartment had been figments of a diseased imagination. This morning he knew with stark clarity he was as sane as any man ever was. And with equal clarity he knew that whatever persons or whatever supernatural forces, had created this incredible situation, Helen either was dead or in horrible danger.

While the thought caused a recurrence of all the terrors the numb conviction he was mad had deadened, it also brought relief of another sort. Aside from the natural relief of knowing he was not mentally diseased, for the first time, he faced squarely the problem of Helen’s danger and found the courage to fight it.

He started the fight by mentally going over everything that had happened from the moment his key refused to open the apartment door until his trancelike entry into the room where he now lay. Every action of his own, every word spoken by others, he reviewed in detail in an attempt to find some small point he could grip as a start toward an explanation.

He found two, but they floated into his mind so unobtrusively, it was some moments before he realized their significance. But when he finally did, he leaped from bed in excitement.

The first detail was small, and by itself probably would have escaped his attention.

It consisted merely of his recollection that Mrs. Johansen, the new landlady at the rooming house where Helen had stayed, had addressed the detective as “Sergeant,” although he had offered no introduction other than his badge. How had she known his rank, when she gave no indication that she had ever seen him before?

It was the second detail which filled him with overwhelming excitement. From Mrs. Johansen’s Sergeant Joe Murphree had driven straight to Mrs. Weston’s.

But he had not asked the address, and at no point during the supposed investigation had Harry given it to him.

Sergeant Don Murphy was not pleased to see Harry.

“I start work at four p.m.,” he said inhospitably. “You’ll find cops on duty at Headquarters.”

“Just any cop won’t do,” Harry told him. “I thought maybe you’d be interested in knowing your police department is crooked.”

The thin detective’s expression did not change and his body continued to bar the door of his small frame cottage. But his voice lost its inhospitable edge.

Without inflection he asked, “You just find that out? How long you been in Wright City?”

Harry ran his eyes over the front of the cheap but tidy cottage, glanced at the neatly trimmed lawn, which was just large enough to accommodate a single tree, and finally settled on a ten-year-old sedan at the curb. “Your car..?” he asked.

Sergeant Murphy stared at him a moment. “Yeah.”

“Sergeant Joe Murphree drives a Mercury convertible. Brand new.”

“Yeah,” Murphy repeated.

“I’ll bet he lives in a bigger home than this, too.”

The thin man regarded him expressionlessly. Then he silently pushed the screen door wide.

Though inexpensively furnished, the living room was as neat and attractive as the outside of the house. Just as Harry seated himself in a worn but comfortable armchair, a boy of about two streaked into the room at a tottering run, a sugar cookie firmly grasped in one pudgy hand.

Behind him rushed a plump, attractive woman clad in a house dress. Before she could reach the youngster, Murphy scooped him up and said, “Here! Who told you you could have cookies before breakfast?” The simple act of picking up the child instantly transformed the thin detective from an emotionless cop to an average husband and father. The habitual chilliness of his expression was replaced by a mock sternness recognizable even to the child as a cover for extreme gentleness. With a happy giggle the youngster allowed his father to salvage the cookie and hand it to his mother.”

“Donnie always grabs a cookie before meals,” Murphy explained to Harry. “It’s a game. Never eats it, but likes the sport of being chased.”

With unconcealed pride he introduced his wife as Anne.

“How do you do?” Mrs. Murphy said. “You’ll have to excuse me while I get some breakfast into this young man.”

Preoccupied with his own problem, it had not occurred to Harry until then that eight o’clock on Saturday morning was rather an early hour for a visit. Confused, he began to apologize for interrupting breakfast.

“We’re finished,” Anne Murphy said. “We let Donnie sleep till eight because we’ve never been able to get him to take an afternoon nap. You aren’t disturbing us at all.”

As soon as she disappeared with the boy, the thin detective became all policeman again. In a cold voice he asked, “Now what’s all this about crooked cops?”

Harry said, “You know about my wife disappearing. Last night, Sergeant Murphree took me on what was supposed to be an investigation, but which I think actually was a deliberate demonstration to me that my case was hopeless. I believe the design was either to convince me I was mad, or frighten me into the realization that if I continued to insist I had a wife and lived at Carlton Avenue, I would end up in an observation ward, and possibly be committed as insane.”

“You mean you think Murphree had something to do with your wife’s disappearance?”

“I’m sure he was a definite part of the cover-up.” He told of Mrs. Johansen’s inadvertent reference to Murphree as “Sergeant,” and of the bull-necked detective driving straight to Harry’s old rooming house without asking the address.

“He’s not only a crook, but a cheap chiseler,” Harry concluded. “Even while he was deliberately making a sucker out of me, he took time out to work me for a two-and-a-half-dollar meal in an expensive restaurant.”

With no expression on his face to indicate his thoughts, Sergeant Murphy turned Harry’s story over in his mind. At last he said, “All right, Joe Murphree is a crooked cop. But why come to me instead of taking your complaint to Headquarters?”

“Maybe at Headquarters I’d run into more crooked cops. I been thinking it over, and it seems funny the desk sergeant referred me to Murphree by name instead of just sending me to the detective bureau. Maybe they expected my visit and were all primed.”

“Maybe I’m crooked too,” the detective said dryly.

Harry shook his head. “Last evening I could tell you hated Joe Murphree’s guts. When I became convinced Murphree was a crooked cop, it occurred to me maybe you hated him because you’re an honest one.”

The thin detective emitted a non-committal grunt. “And what do you think I can do?”

“Maybe nothing,” Harry said. “But you’re a trained investigator and I imagine you know Wright City pretty well. I’m not even an amateur investigator and I’m practically a stranger in the city. Alone, I wouldn’t even know where to start, but with your help I might at least have a chance.”

“Look, Nolan,” Murphy said bluntly. “This isn’t even a Homicide case. At least not yet. I put in more time than I get paid for now. Why should I stick my neck out off-duty for a guy I only met yesterday?”

Harry said slowly, “No reason — except I think you’re an honest cop.”

The detective glanced at him sharply. “What’s that got to do with it? I can name you as many honest cops on the force as crooked ones.”

Harry said evenly, “Doesn’t an honest cop have certain responsibilities that aren’t listed in regulations? Sort of moral responsibilities? Me, I was raised to obey the law and respect the law, but never to be afraid of it. Probably most American kids grow up with that attitude. But when you find yourself in a jam and go to the police for help, only to discover the police are working with the criminals who caused your jam, it shakes your faith in the whole law-enforcement system. I’m not speaking as an irate taxpayer, but merely as a citizen who has always believed in the American system of government. What would happen to our society if all our law-abiding citizens lost faith in our system of law enforcement?”

“Anarchy, probably,” Murphy said laconically. “But even honest detective sergeants can’t buck City Hall. And Joe Murphree has the backing of City Hall.”

Harry was silent for a moment. “I see,” he said finally. “I suppose it is asking a lot, since I imagine an honest cop in this town has to move pretty carefully if he wants to hold his job. Naturally you have to consider your wife and kid’s security.” Rising from his chair and walking to the door, Harry turned and said without any particular emphasis, “I suppose Helen isn’t the first woman in Wright City who ever vanished. Or the last. It could happen in any family.”

Involuntarily, the detective glanced toward the door through which his wife had disappeared with his son. Then his chill face relaxed in a wry smile.

“Come on back and sit down,” he said wearily.

Chapter Three Proof of a Wife

Sergeant Don Murphy sighed. “Before you get your hopes up, I want you to understand a few things. You know much about Wright City?”

Harry shook his head. “I’ve only been here six weeks.”

“Well, it’s a wide-open town, if you know what that means.”

“You mean gambling and such stuff? I know that much, because you can’t walk into a tavern, drug store or filling station without stumbling over a one-armed bandit. And I’ve heard the fellows at work talk about gambling houses, though I’ve never been to one. You mean it’s wide open — like Reno and Las Vegas?”

“I mean wide open like Wright City. In Reno and Las Vegas gambling is legal. Here it couldn’t operate without a powerful and crooked city administration behind it. And gambling is only one of the things that make it a wide open town. We’ve got ninety-four fleabag hotels where anything goes, and at least two dozen retail outlets for marijuana and heroin. The city is rotten with graft from the mayor on down, with the sole exception of the Homicide Squad. Lieutenant George Blair is our boss, and there hasn’t yet been enough money minted to fix him. Otherwise the whole city is crooked. The mayor himself is only a figurehead for Big John Gault, who runs the whole shebang.”

“I’ve heard of Big John,” Harry said. “But I thought he was just some kind of politician. A couple of guys at work seem to take a kind of pride in knowing him casually. I remember one fellow bragging that he had Big John’s unlisted phone number and no cop could ever nail him on a traffic violation. He said all he had to do was mention the number, and the cop would apologize for bothering him.”

“Yeah,” Murphy said bitterly. “Half the people in town know Big John casually, and every one of them is proud of it. John Gault is a professional glad-hander. He passes out that unlisted number like most politicians pass out cigars, and it actually is a password to kill traffic tickets. It makes everybody who has it feel like a little big shot because he is a personal friend of Big John’s. Just one of the many smooth techniques Gault uses to keep himself entrenched.”

“You think this Big John might have something to do with this?”

“Hardly likely,” Murphy said. “But Joe Murphree is one of his boys, and if Joe is mixed up in it, somebody with real weight is giving orders. That means the minute they suspect I’m moving in, Lieutenant Blair will get instructions from the commissioner to keep his cops on homicide cases. And I’ll get jerked on the carpet. You’ll have to do the leg work. I’ll tell you what I want, and when you get it, either bring it to me or phone it to me.”

“That’s fair enough,” Harry said. “If you can just tell me what to do. I haven’t the faintest idea where to start.”

“You can start by convincing me you actually had a wife,” Murphy told him. “For all I know, you’re a crackpot, and I’m not wasting my off-duty time until I know different.”

“But how can I prove it?” Harry protested. “Everybody lies.”

“Don’t you have any friends who knew you were married?”

“We haven’t had time to make friends. Helen was only here three weeks, remember. The first week, while I was working she was hunting a job, and evenings we spent hunting an apartment. The second week we both worked and evenings still hunted an apartment. When we found one a week ago, we immediately got married, and while we both continued to work, this past week was our honeymoon. Who the devil wants to make friends on a honeymoon?”

The detective’s thin lips quirked slightly at the corners. “How about the men you know at work? You must have mentioned Helen to some of them.”

Harry reddened slightly, and when Murphy simply waited for a reply, said lamely, “There’s a lot of noise. We don’t talk much.”

The detective looked incredulous.

“Well there is,” Harry said defensively. “Ajax makes fractionization units and condensers for the oil industry. My job is fit-up. They hand me a set of blueprints and a lot of steel parts, and I tack-weld them together. I have a helper, but usually he’s a different guy every day, and half the time I don’t even know his name. Even if I do, we have to talk mostly in gestures. Aside from the noise we’re making, all around us guys are using grinders and chippers, cranes are running overhead, and it’s just one constant din.”

Murphy continued to look incredulous. Harry’s blush deepened.

“Well,” he said reluctantly. “I do talk to guys at lunch time. But if you ever worked in a shop, you know how the guys are. They kid a lot. I didn’t want a lot of cracks about honeymooning.”

Murphy’s expression became more understanding. “So you never mentioned at all you were getting married?”

Harry shook his head ashamedly.

“All right. I’ll swallow that. How about the fellows who roomed at the same place you did?”

“I never got to know any of them that well,” Harry said. “Just to say hello to, of chat with a minute when we met in the hall. I doubt they even noticed I moved out.”

Murphy regarded him silently for a moment. “You’re getting harder and harder to swallow, Nolan. Where were you married?”

“At City Hall. By the record clerk.”

“Got the certificate?”

“It disappeared along with all of Helen’s stuff.”

“Got any letters she wrote? Anything at all in her handwriting?”

Harry shook his head. “I did have in the apartment, but everything except my personal stuff disappeared.” Then he thought of Dale Thompson’s private number, which Helen had written down for him, and started to reach for his wallet. He stopped the movement and smiled ruefully when he recalled Sergeant Joe Murphree had appropriated the slip. “I let your friend Murphree get away with the only sample of her handwriting I had.”

Murphy’s expressionless eyes contemplated him for a long time. Finally he said, “I’ve got an open mind on whether or not you’re a crackpot. Get down to City Hall and spend fifty cents on a certified copy of your marriage certificate. Bring me that. And you better go now, because they close at noon on Saturday.”

When Harry left the home of Sergeant Don Murphy, he felt a little cheered in spite of not having completely gained the thin detective’s confidence. At least he was starting to do something definite about finding Helen. But his cheer turned to black despair when the city clerk informed him there was no record of a marriage between Harry Nolan and Helen Lawson.

He did not know the name of the record clerk who had married them, but he prowled through City Hall from one end to the other looking into offices without spotting the man. Similarly, he was unable to recall the names of the witnesses, remembering only that they were a young couple applying for a marriage license and had been recruited from the hall by the record clerk. It gave him no satisfaction whatever to realize both names and their addresses were on the missing marriage certificate.

He phoned a report to Sergeant Murphy from a booth at City Hall.

Murphy grunted noncommittally. “Either somebody really big is behind this, or you’re an out-and-out crackpot,” he said. “Try the Midtown Employment Agency and see if they have a record of your wife’s referral to Dale Thompson.”

With dampened enthusiasm Harry took a streetcar to the Midtown Employment Agency. He was not surprised to discover the agency not only had no record of the referral, but denied ever registering a client named Helen Lawson.

Dispirited, he phoned Sergeant Murphy again. “Listen,” he said, “I can prove by people in Des Moines there is such a girl as Helen Lawson and we planned to get married. She hasn’t any parents, but we had a lot of mutual friends who knew our plans, and she has an aunt there who must have known she left Des Moines to join me.”

“That won’t prove she’s your wife, or even that she ever arrived in Wright City,” the detective said. “For all I know she may have disappeared en route, and maybe worry has sent you off your rocker so you imagine you got married.”

Harry asked wearily, “What should I do now?”

“Try the newspaper morgues. Saturday marriages would be listed in Monday’s papers.”

There were two newspapers in Wright City, the Evening Herald and the Morning Sun. Just before noon Harry phoned Sergeant Murphy for the third time, and this time there was jubilance in his voice.

“I didn’t find the item,” he reported. “But at least I finally found definite evidence of cover-up. Monday’s morgue copy of both papers has the list of marriages scissored out.”

“I hit something too,” Murphy told him. “Why didn’t you mention you had a post office box?”

Harry repeated blankly, “A post office box?”

“Yeah. It occurred to me if you were new in town and had no permanent address, you might have rented a box. And people don’t fix Uncle Sam’s post office. So I made a phone call.”

“Of course!” Harry said, seeing the light and berating himself for not thinking of it sooner. “I rented it in both our names as soon as I got to town, because I knew Helen was coming shortly, and then after we got married, I changed it to Mr. and Mrs. Harry Nolan. I made the change Monday.”

“Yeah. After I told them you were a suspect in a homicide case, they looked up the record and told me about the change.”

“A suspect?” Harry asked, surprised.

“The post office is a little finicky about handing out information even to cops unless you got a good reason. Meet me at Twelfth and Monroe at one o’clock.”

Harry was puzzled by the detective’s abrupt order to meet him at Twelfth and Monroe Streets, but he was also elated. Apparently the evidence of the post office box had converted Sergeant Murphy into belief of Harry’s story, for his tone over the telephone had been almost banteringly friendly. Harry hoped that the rendezvous meant the sergeant now intended to take an active part in the investigation instead of merely sitting at home and issuing orders.

With his confidence elevated and with an hour to kill before he met Murphy, Harry suddenly realized he was hungry. Then with some degree of shock he realized he was not merely hungry, but famished, as he had eaten nothing since noon the previous day. Entering the first restaurant he saw, he ate two blue plate specials.

Harry alighted from a streetcar at Twelfth and Monroe at ten of one. On one corner there was a branch public library, and he sat on its wide steps to wait for the detective.

Sergeant Murphy arrived in his ten-year-old sedan promptly at one.

“Let’s go inside,” he said laconically, and walked up the library steps.

At the desk Murphy asked for two “stack” cards, entered the date and his signature on one and had Harry similarly fill out the other. In exchange for the cards the attendant gave them a key.

A moment later Murphy was unlocking a grilled iron door which opened on a flight of stairs leading downward. At the bottom of the stairs they found a vault-like room containing tier on tier of shelves loaded with periodicals and newspapers.

“The stacks,” Murphy explained. “You’ll find everything from 1864 issues of Godey’s Lady Book to current issues of Argosy. I thought maybe our friends might have forgotten public libraries keep files of newspapers as well as newspaper morgues do.”

They had forgotten, Harry and Murphy discovered. No one had used scissors on the stack copies of Monday’s Herald and Sun. And both listed the marriage of Harry and Helen on the previous Saturday.

Harry let out a long breath. Sergeant Murphy regarded him with a wry smile.

“Don’t get your hopes too high,” he advised. “This puts me behind you a hundred percent, but I’m just a dumb cop, not Sherlock Holmes.”

Harry said with utter confidence, “With one phone call and one trip you’ve managed to find two bits of evidence that I’ve been telling the truth. We’ll find Helen now.”

Murphy was less confident. “We’ve still got a long way to go. But I’ve an idea of where to start.”

A long table for the convenience of research workers was centered in each of the narrow corridors formed by the tiers of shelves. Lifting a stack of newspapers from a shelf to one of the tables, Murphy returned to the shelf for another stack and laid it beside the first.

He said. “When I say I’m behind you a hundred percent, I mean I’m accepting what your wife told you as truth, too. I think she really was Dale Thompson’s secretary and this Dorothy Wentworth you talked to lied. It could be more than coincidence that your wife disappeared just as her boss dropped dead. We’ll start two months back and read every word Thompson put in his column. Maybe we’ll just waste time, but maybe we’ll find a hint of what this is all about.”

Off and on Harry had glanced over Dale Thompson’s syndicated column for a number of years, but he had never before read him with concentration. The man had been a reporter rather than a commentator, Harry discovered, reporting facts as he saw them, but rarely drawing any editorial inferences from his stories. He had an urgent, staccato style which tended to make every item of news seem sensational, whether it was the expose of an ambassador’s liaison with a chambermaid, or merely the expectant motherhood of some well-known actress.

His material was not as specialized as that of most columnists, for he roamed at will from cafe society gossip to politics, war and crime news, and occasionally even to sports. Sometimes his column was straight reporting, other times he would insert personal anecdotes, often of a humorous nature, describing such things as a horse race he had witnessed, a trip to his dentist, or the political views of his favorite barber. Whenever he drifted off into such anecdotes he dropped his staccato reporting style in favor of more leisurely and whimsical narrative style.

It was an anecdote of this nature about six weeks back which brought a low whistle from Sergeant Murphy. Harry had already passed it without grasping its significance when the detective called his attention to it.

“Listen to this,” Murphy said, reading aloud. “‘Monday was our semi-annual checkup time, when old Doc Moody taps our knee with a rubber mallet, looks disappointed when our reactions indicate we have not yet gone mad, sticks a stethoscope to our chest and shakes his head sadly because the pump is still going strong, checks our blood pressure and after numerous other tests, reluctantly decides we may last another six months. At fifty-two no one has a right to health as good as ours, Doc complains, testily letting us know that if all his patients stood the gaff as well as we do, he’d have to cut down to two Cadillacs.’”

Looking at the paper’s date over the sergeant’s shoulder, Harry said thoughtfully, “Six weeks back he had a sound heart, eh?”

“Yeah. Think I’ll have a little talk with Doc Moody.” Murphy made a note of the name on a small pad.

In silence they both read on for a time. Harry, being the faster reader, was several columns ahead of Murphy when he caught the next pertinent item. And this time he recognized its importance.

“Get this, Sergeant,” he said, reading aloud in turn. “‘A local big shot politician is due for trouble up to his eyebrows when Uncle Sam receives unexpected evidence of his involvement in the narcotic business. Watch this column for sensational developments.”

This time the detective peered over Harry’s shoulder. “April sixth,” he muttered. “Three weeks ago.”

“Could the local politician be your Big John Gault?” Harry asked.

“Could be,” Murphy resumed reading.

In the very next column Harry encountered an item which sent his pulses pounding. It read: We used to disagree with the philosophy of the racketeer politician who runs things around here that every man has his price. Reluctantly we’ve come around to his point of view since discovering his money was able to buy a leak right in our own office. The firing of a hireling has plugged the leak, but it can’t bring back the evidence the racketeer bought from our files. The sensational expose promised yesterday is postponed for the time being.

Excited, Harry showed the item to Murphy. “He fired that Wentworth woman!” he exclaimed. “That’s how he happened to need a secretary just when Helen was looking for a job. Somehow, after he was dead and Helen disappeared, they got her to go back and pretend she’d been working for him all along.”

Murphy merely grunted.

The second-from-last column, that of the previous Thursday, contained the item which seemed to please Murphy most. It read: Wright City’s Mr. Big is going to be very angry with his city comptroller for being careless with a certain black ledger. But he’ll have a long time to cool off. About forty years. We’ll start printing excerpts from the ledger tomorrow.

The final column, that of the day before, was full of big name gossip, but made no mention of the black ledger.

“That does it,” Murphy said with a note of finality. He began stacking the papers back on their shelf.

“Does what?” Harry asked, moving to assist in the task.

“Gives me an excuse to start taking an official interest in your wife’s disappearance.”

The remark made no sense to Harry, but the detective apparently did not care to elaborate. When the papers were back on the shelf in proper order, he led the way out of the place.

A block from the library Sergeant Murphy parked his sedan in front of a drug store. When Harry followed him inside, the detective made for the phone booths at the rear. Turning to the “M” section of the phone book, he ran his finger along a page until he reached a whole quarter column of “Moodys”. Harry noted that only two Moodys had the initials M.D. behind the name.

“George and Henry Moody,” Murphy said. “We’ll try George first.”

Dropping a dime in the phone slot, the detective dialed a number. Through the open booth door Harry heard him ask if he were speaking to the Doctor Moody who was Dale Thompson’s physician. After a moment he grunted a thanks and hung up.

“Dr. George Moody is Dr. Henry Moody’s son,” he remarked to Harry. “He says the old man was Thompson’s doctor.”

This time, when he dropped his dime and dialed, he pulled the booth door shut so that Harry was unable to hear the conversation. His talk with Dr. Henry Moody was remarkably brief, however, for in less than a minute he was out of the booth.

“Let’s go visit my boss,” he said tersely.

Chapter Four Killer’s Corner

Lieutenant George Blair, head of the Wright City Homicide Squad, proved to be a wiry man of fifty with gray hair, a gentle face and eyes as hard as emery.

After acknowledging Harry’s introduction, he inquired of Sergeant Murphy, “Busman’s holiday, Don?”

“Sort of, Lieutenant. This one looks too hot to wait. I guess you heard about Dale Thompson’s death.”

The lieutenant nodded. “Heart attack yesterday morning.”

“I make it out homicide.”

The lieutenant’s eyebrows raised. Settling himself in his chair, he clasped hands over his stomach and said mildly, “Shoot.”

“What started me on this was Harry Nolan here. Coming in to report his wife missing,” the sergeant explained. “The desk sent him to see Joe Murphree, but by accident he got to me instead and told his story before either of us realized he was talking to the wrong guy.” Briefly, Murphy recounted the facts of Helen’s disappearance, the negative results of the investigation made by Sergeant Joe Murphree, and the subsequent investigation he and Harry had made that day.

“We ended up by reading Dale Thompson’s column for the past two months,” he concluded. “Three weeks ago he hinted at an exposure in his column of a local political big shot being tied in with the dope racket. The next day he mentioned firing an employee for lifting what evidence he had and peddling it to the political big shot. Only this time he made it more definite by calling him the racketeer politician who runs Wright City.”

“Big John Gault,” Lieutenant Blair said thoughtfully.

“Exactly. Day before yesterday he announced he had gotten hold of a certain black ledger which would put Mr. Big Shot away for forty years, and the next day he would start printing excerpts from the ledger. But the next day he died, and when his final column appeared, it contained no mention of the ledger.”

Lieutenant Blair considered his sergeant thoughtfully. “So you think perhaps he was bumped to stop publication of whatever was in the ledger, and somebody substituted another column for the one he had ready to submit? Good enough motive, but pretty thin evidence of homicide in the face of a natural causes death certificate.”

“I’ve got more,” Murphy assured him, “Six weeks ago Thompson mentioned in his column having a physical examination and passing with flying colors. I just phoned his regular doc, who verified he had never detected any heart condition. And Thompson’s regular doctor was not called in the case. The first he knew, about it was where he read it in the papers. He doesn’t know who was called.”

“Hmm,” the lieutenant said.

“Add to that Thompson’s secretary disappearing so completely there isn’t even evidence she ever existed, and the secretary who presumably was fired three weeks ago reappearing and claiming she had never left the job, and at the very least you’ve got evidence of conspiracy. My opinion is Thompson was murdered and Mrs. Nolan disappeared because of the black ledger Thompson mentioned.”

For a few moments Lieutenant Blair said nothing, simply pursing his lips and frowning at one corner of the room. At last he looked up with a crooked smile.

“Big John has been pretty careful about tangling with this department, Don. I kind of doubt he’d take a chance on trying to cover up a murder.”

“To beat a forty-year rap I’d try murder myself, Lieutenant.”

“Yeah, I see your point. But you know this department is in a peculiar position. For ten years we’ve been in a state of armed truce with the rest of the city administration. Gault and his crew never try to fix a homicide case, and in return we keep our noses out of everything that isn’t homicide business. And for ten years we’ve all known the minute either side steps over the line, it’s all out war.”

Sergeant Murphy asked quietly, “You mean forget it, Lieutenant?”

The lieutenant’s face remained gentle, but his eyes could have chipped stone. “I mean if you make a mistake, the next head of the Homicide Squad will take orders from John Gault.” He glanced at his watch. “You go on duty in an hour. It’s your case. Move quietly and be sure there’s no leak at all until you have it airtight.”

“Yes, sir. Any other instructions?”

“Yeah. For your autopsy order stay away from Judge Bender and Judge Livingston. Bender blabs and Livingston is in Gault’s pocket. Contact either Judge Ward or Judge Centner.” He paused a moment, then added reflectively, “If the autopsy is negative, we’ll have to pull in our horns fast and I start thinking up alibis.”

“Sure — if it’s negative.”

When they were once again outside, the sergeant said to Harry, “Go on home and sit tight. There isn’t a thing we can do until we get an autopsy report, and that will take twenty-four hours. If anything comes up, I’ll phone you at Mrs. Weston’s. If you don’t hear from me, call me at home Monday morning and I’ll give you a briefing.”

“But what about Helen?” Harry asked.

Murphy dropped a hand on his shoulder. “You’ll just have to sweat it out. We can’t make a move until we definitely establish Thompson’s death was homicide. You heard the lieutenant.”

“Suppose you can’t prove it’s homicide?”

The sergeant grinned dryly. “Then I’ll ask you to give me a job reference over at Ajax. In the meantime, don’t bother me by calling up for progress reports before Monday. I’ll have enough on my mind until then.”

So Harry went back to Mrs. Weston’s rooming house to sweat it out. It was the longest period of sweating he ever did. From four o’clock Saturday afternoon, when he reached his room, until Monday morning he left the room only for meals, afraid Sergeant Murphy might phone while he was gone. But the sergeant did not phone.

Just before dusk Sunday evening the downstairs bell rang and Harry glanced out his window to see a squad car at the curb. A few minutes later a burly policeman went down the front steps with Mrs. Weston, helped the landlady into the car and drove away. As the car started off, Harry glimpsed Sergeant Murphy in the back seat.

Overpowering curiosity almost made him phone Headquarters to inquire what this meant, but he was deterred by the definite instructions of the sergeant. He spent a second sleepless night and phoned Murphy at home at exactly eight a.m. Monday.

“Aren’t you working today?” the sergeant asked.

“Working? You think I could calmly go to work without knowing whether Helen’s alive or dead?”

Sergeant Murphy said quietly, “It’s my guess she’s alive.”

Harry’s heart jumped. “You’ve found out where she is?”

“No. Let’s take one thing at a time. First, the autopsy on Dale Thompson showed poisoning by potassium cyanide, apparently administered in coffee. The guess is he got it at breakfast a couple of hours before eleven a.m., the time on his death certificate. We’ve got the doc who signed the certificate, but I think he’s in the clear. He’s seventy-eight years old, half blind, half deaf and semi-retired, which probably was why he was called. The medical examiner tells me unless he suspects poisoning or happens to catch a whiff of bitter almonds, any doctor might diagnose a cyanide death as a simple coronary. This guy was a cinch to. He was called to Thompson’s penthouse at eleven o’clock by Dorothy Wentworth, who told him she was Thompson’s secretary.”

Harry asked, “Did she kill him?”

“Unless she’s a wonderful actress, she didn’t even know it was murder. But that’s ahead of the story. Soon we got the autopsy report, we quietly pulled in Dorothy Wentworth, Mrs. and Mr. Kurt Arnold, the apartment manager, Mrs. Johansen and Mrs. Weston. We stuck them in separate cells, let them brood awhile, and then informed all but Dorothy Wentworth we were charging them with conspiracy to commit murder. We told the Wentworth woman we were holding her on suspicion of first degree homicide.”

The sergeant emitted a dry chuckle. “Wentworth broke first, and as soon as the others learned of her break, they all started squealing like rats. Dorothy Wentworth’s story is she was phoned by a man named Gerald Crane, apparently the same man to whom she sold the evidence that got her fired. He told her Thompson had unexpectedly died of a heart attack and he wanted her to put on an act for him. He told her she’d get two thousand dollars if she went to Thompson’s penthouse, pretended she was still his secretary and phoned a certain physician to come at once because her boss had just had a heart attack! He warned her someone would probably call trying to locate the real secretary, and the police might even come around asking about her. But he told her the investigating cop would be in on the deal, and all she had to do was deny ever hearing of the woman. She says she suspected the plot had something to do with stopping the item about the ledger, but she thought Crane was simply taking advantage of Thompson’s sudden death, and she didn’t suspect murder.”

Harry asked, “Who is this Gerald Crane?”

“A flunky of Big John Gault’s. The rest of the story we got from our other witnesses. Crane contacted the apartment manager first and fixed him with a thousand dollars plus decorating expenses to get in a crew of workmen and change your apartment around. The Kurt Arnolds were moved in by Crane a half hour before you got home from work. Their fee was only five hundred. Apparently Crane got stingier as he went along.

“From the apartment manager Crane learned the former addresses of you and your wife. He fixed Mrs. Weston with two hundred bucks, had your personal stuff moved from the apartment back to your old room, and had the lock from your apartment transferred to your room door.

“At your wife’s old rooming house apparently Crane ran into a snag. Seems Mrs. Swovboda was honest. We don’t know where she is, but she definitely didn’t sell out to Mrs. Johansen and move to Florida. Mrs. Johansen is an old-time bit actress, and she was moved into the rooming house by Crane about an hour before you arrived with Sergeant Joe Murphree. All she got was a mere hundred. She grew quite upset when she learned she was at the bottom of the salary scale.”

Harry asked, “Have you got this man Gerald Crane?”

“Not yet,” Sergeant Murphy said. “We’re a little handicapped because there are only eleven men on the Homicide Squad. If we put out a general call on him, we could draw on the whole police department, but there’s too many leaks in the department. Crane would know about it within minutes. We want Crane under wraps before anybody even knows we’re investigating the case.”

“I see,” Harry said dubiously. “But what about Helen? What’s the reason behind all this elaborate plot? And what makes you think she’s still alive?”

“It’s pure theory from here on,” the sergeant admitted. “But I think it’s sound reasoning. Obviously, as Thompson’s secretary, your wife knew about the ledger, too. I don’t think Gerald Crane or Big John Gault have their hands on the ledger yet. If they had, probably your wife would simply have been killed in a traffic accident or some such thing. Since she wasn’t, they must be holding her somewhere trying to pry out of her where the ledger is.”

Harry said slowly, “You mean torture?”

Murphy hesitated a moment. Then he said reluctantly, “Possibly. But that’s better than being dead.”

A wave of sickness ran over Harry. In a numb voice he said, “I still don’t understand why they went through this elaborate farce of changing the apartment and all.”

“You would if you thought about it,” Murphy told him. “If Dale Thompson’s secretary mysteriously disappeared the same day the columnist died, it would look suspicious as the devil. And with that item about the ledger appearing only the day before, the finger would point straight at Big John Gault. The only way they could hold her without raising such a furor that even the FBI might start nosing around to see if maybe she’d been kidnapped, was to make it appear she never existed. So when Thompson died, his secretary continued on public display in the person of Dorothy Wentworth.”

“I see,” Harry said slowly. “Is there any way I can help from here on out?”

“Yeah. Just sit quiet and stay out of our hair till we break this thing. And we will, don’t worry.”

Yes, Harry thought as he hung up. But in the meantime what kind of pain was Helen suffering?

After fifteen minutes of sitting on the bed and smoking cigarettes, he knew he could not possibly spend another day simply waiting in his room. He had to have some kind of action or go crazy.

The wild thought occurred to him of looking up Big John Gault’s address, calling on the man and beating out of him Helen’s whereabouts. But immediately he realized the man probably not only had bodyguards, but any such attempted act would blow wide open the secrecy Sergeant Murphy wanted to maintain. Reluctantly he decided the Homicide Squad was undoubtedly better equipped to deal with murderers than a half crazed husband would be.

Finally he settled on the innocuous action of going to the post office to see if he and Helen had any mail.

Though the post office was only three blocks from their apartment on Carlton Avenue, a factor in their deciding to keep the box even after they had a permanent address, it was fifteen blocks from Mrs. Weston’s rooming house. Harry took a streetcar.

There was some mail. An envelope containing a coupon worth ten cents on the purchase of a large box of soap flakes, a card addressed to Miss Helen Lawson from Helen’s aunt in Des Moines, who had not yet been informed her niece was married, and a slip informing him there was a package at the package desk.

As he started toward the package desk, two men crowded against him from either side. Politely he waited for them to move out of the way, but neither moved. Instead he felt the prod of something hard and round in his left kidney.

The man on his left, a tall lank individual with a gray face said, “Yeah, it’s a gun. Just move toward the door like we was three pals, or it’ll go off.”

Slowly, Harry glanced from the gray-faced man to the plump, round-headed man on his right. The latter gave him a happy grin.

“There’s another one right close to your right kidney. Do like the man says.”

At a gentle prod from the man on the left, he began to move without hurry toward the door. All about them people were waiting in queues, stamping letters or exasperatedly trying to write with post-office pens, but no one paid the slightest attention as the closely grouped trio left the building. The sidewalk was full of hurrying people too, but not one so much as glanced at them.

At the curb, in a space marked, Reserved for Post Office customers — Ten minute parking only, stood a green Buick sedan. The round man on Harry’s right opened the rear door and the gray-faced man prodded Harry in. He followed behind Harry to sit beside him, while the plump man rounded the car to slide behind the wheel.

As he pulled away from the parking place, the man behind the wheel said breezily, “We been waiting for you since the post office opened at eight. We figured you’d come after your mail eventually.”

Harry asked, “What do you want with me? If this is a holdup, all I’ve got with me is twelve dollars.”

The plump man laughed. Harry’s seat companion said nothing, merely quietly holding his gun pointed casually in Harry’s direction.

Harry grew conscious that he was still gripping his mail in one hand. As he stuffed it into his inside breast pocket, the gray-faced man glanced at him sharply, but made no comment.

The rest of the trip was made without conversation. It was not a long trip, about twenty-five blocks, but the plump man drove leisurely and obeyed all traffic regulations. When the car left the downtown business district, they passed through a middle-class residential district then through a poorer class district and finally through the slums, always moving in the general direction of the river.

In the waterfront area, on a street consisting largely of vacant warehouses and decrepit office buildings which had been condemned by the city to make room for a waterfront parkway which never materialized, the car suddenly swung through the open truck entrance of what looked from the outside like an unoccupied warehouse. As his seat mate backed from the car and gestured with his gun for Harry to alight, the plump driver returned to the truck entrance and closed the doors.

Then the two men urged him up a flight of stairs and into a barnlike room large enough to office at least fifty clerks. There were no longer any desks in it, however, its furnishings now consisting of only a kitchen table and a few straight chairs, three folding canvas cots containing single blankets and a packing case with a table model radio on it.

One corner of Harry’s mind noted that two men sat at the kitchen table and a third sat on one of the cots, but the notation was merely automatic, for his attention centered on the figure stretched full length on a second cot. It was Helen and she was alive.

Ignoring the sharp command of the gray-faced man, Harry ran to his wife and took her in his arms. She looked up at him wonderingly, her face drawn with fatigue and streaked with dried tears, then buried her head in his shoulder with a little whimper.

After a moment she exhaustedly lay back on the pillow and looked up at him with sorrow. “I hoped they’d let you alone,” she whispered. “Why did they have to involve you?”

“Have they hurt you?” Harry demanded.

“My feet,” she said. “Just my feet.” She closed her eyes with an expression of pain.

Twisting in his seat on the cot, Harry stared down at his wife’s feet. Both were encased in bandages.

An almost insane rage engulfed him. Slowly he rose to his feet and glared through a crimson haze at the five men in the room. The man seated on the other cot was thin and pock-marked and had cold eyes which stared back at Harry indifferently. Of the two men seated at the table, one was huge and red-faced and carried about him an air of bluff good humor. The other was slim, and distinguished-looking, with a thin, austere face and iron-gray hair which curled upward over his ears. The two men who had brought him in stood just inside the door.

Harry took a step toward the table. “Which one of you...?” he said with muffled incoherency. “I’m going to—”

Casually, the pock-marked man on the cot produced a knife with a thin six inch blade. He balanced it on his palm and studied Harry appraisingly. Harry swung his gaze to the man. “Are you the one?” he asked softly.

The knife flipped in a small arc and landed back in the man’s palm. His eyes remained on Harry. “Yeah,” he said. “Cigarettes on the soles, if you’re interested. Tape on the mouth, to keep her from yelling. Make you mad?”

Harry’s muscles bunched for a blind rush, then he froze as a voice from the table cracked like a pistol shot. “Hold it, Nolan!”

Harry twisted toward the voice. It was the big, red-faced man who had spoken.

In a reasonable tone the man said, “Ripper can slice the edge of a playing card with that thing at thirty feet. On top of that my two boys at the door have cocked pistols aimed at your guts. Nobody wants to harm either you or your wife. Let’s talk things over like reasonable human beings.”

He waved a hand at one of the vacant chairs around the table. Harry glanced back at the knife, then at the two guns centered at him from the doorway. Finally he looked down at Helen, who gave him a smile full of pain and shook her head hopelessly.

Harry’s shoulders slumped and he walked over to seat himself at the table.

“Let me introduce myself,” the big man said. “I’m John Gault, and this is my assistant, Gerald Crane.”

Without preamble, Big John Gault announced what he wanted the black ledger mentioned in Dale Thompson’s column. He was convinced Helen knew where it was, but had been unable to persuade her to tell. Harry had been brought in to aid the persuasion. If he could talk his wife into disclosing where the ledger was, Big John was willing to pay them five thousand dollars and put them on a train for Des Moines, with the stipulation that neither ever return to Wright City.

The alternative Big John did not mention, but the implication was obvious.

Harry suppressed his rage enough to remark, “This ledger must be important.” He turned toward Helen. “What’s in it, honey?”

Lifelessly Helen said, “A complete record of payoffs in Wright City for the past ten years. Publication would have put John Gault and his whole crooked gang behind bars.”

“And you know where it is?”

The distinguished looking Gerald Crane answered for her. “We talked to the elevator operator at the Newbold Arms. Your wife arrived for work Friday at eight-thirty, and left the building again ten minutes later with a package the size of the ledger under her arm. She was gone twenty minutes and returned without it. In the interim my friend Ripper and I... ah... called on Mr. Thompson, so when your wife returned, she walked right into our arms. Obviously Thompson suspected we might try to recover the ledger and had your wife secrete it somewhere. She’s wasting her time and ours by insisting she doesn’t know where it is.”

A package under her arm, Harry repeated to himself. His thoughts touched the package slip in his inside pocket, and he knew where the ledger was. Helen had mailed it to their box.

“Why have you held out, honey?” he asked gently. “Was it worth torture?”

Her pain-racked eyes swung to him. “Dale Thompson worked ten years to break this gang’s power,” she said quietly.

Harry said thoughtfully, “Five thousand dollars is a lot of money. Suppose we made a deal so they couldn’t kill us? Suppose we insisted on getting to Des Moines first, and phoning back long distance the information about the ledger? They’d have to trust us to phone, and we’d have to trust them to send the five thousand dollars.”

John Gault said quickly, “We should have picked you up sooner. I’ll buy that one with a slight change. We’ll put your wife on a train for Des Moines, hold you as a hostage so she doesn’t get any ideas about double-crossing us, and release you with five thousand bucks the minute we get the ledger back.”

Helen had looked at Harry with disappointed shock. Looking back at her without expression, Harry slowly let one eyelid droop. Momentarily she looked startled, but she covered her understanding that Harry’s motive was other than appeared on the surface by making her eyes harden.

She said to John Gault, “And let you keep on running your gambling houses and dope shops? That’s what Mr. Thompson was fighting, and what he died for.”

“You’d rather we both die?” Harry asked reasonably.

Helen looked at him silently for a moment, then her lips trembled and she burst into tears.

It took but a few minutes to work out the details of the agreement. The two men who had brought in Harry would get Helen to the noon train, which was scheduled to arrive in Des Moines at eight that evening. Helen would phone John Gault’s unlisted number before midnight, and as soon as the ledger was recovered, Harry would be escorted by the same pair to a train for Des Moines.

She clung to Harry for a moment before she was carried out, but her face was set and emotionless as the trio disappeared through the door. Only a fleeting, final glance of worry from her at the last moment told Harry she knew he was planning something desperate.

Big John Gault rose to his feet. “Just make yourself comfortable and we’ll hope to have you out of here by midnight,” he advised Harry. “You seem like a sensible young man, but I’m sure you’ll understand I can’t taken any chances.” To the pockmarked Ripper he said, “You can handle him all right alone, can’t you?”

Ripper gave the knife in his hand an expert flip and looked at Harry with contempt. He did not bother to reply.

“Then expect us back about midnight,” Gault said. “The boys will bring you in lunch and supper.”

He motioned to Gerald Crane and the two of them left together.

Harry studied the pock-marked man reflectively. “It’s only about ten o’clock,” he said. “You going to sit with that thing in your hand for fourteen hours?”

Smoothly the pock-marked man flipped it once more, then slid it out of sight beneath his coat. In a bored tone he said, “I can get it out and sink it anywhere I want faster I than you could spit. Your limit is fifteen feet away from me. Get an inch closer and you swallow six inches of steel.”

Harry walked over and sat on the cot Helen had occupied. “Got any objection to my taking a nap?” he asked.

Ripper shrugged with indifference. Elevating his left shoe to the cot, Harry unlaced it, pulled it off and left it sitting on the cot next to him. He repeated with the right, also leaving it on the cot then put his feet flat on the floor and wriggled his toes.

“Them’s kind of beat up high shoes you got,” the pock-marked man remarked. “What are you, a farmer?”

“Shop worker. These are safety shoes.” He picked one of the heavy, high-topped shoes up by the toe. “They’ve got steel toes.”

And he sent the heavy shoe spinning end-over-end at the man.

Steel glittered in Ripper’s hand just as the shoe’s steel toe caught him in the chest. He fell backward, righted and flung the knife just as the second shoe caught him full in the face.

A streak of light slithered past Harry’s ear as he hurled himself forward. When he reached the other cot, Ripper was leaning on one elbow, groggily fumbling for the gun under his arm.

Winding his fingers into the man’s hair, Harry pulled him to a seated position and smashed his fist against the pock-marked jaw.

Sergeant Don Murphy said, “Stop jittering. They’ll be here. The train isn’t due to leave for another hour and a quarter.”

The plainclothes man Murphy had dispatched to check the waiting rooms returned and reported a woman with crutches and two men answering the descriptions of the gunmen were in one of the side waiting rooms on the mezzanine. Quickly, the sergeant issued instructions to the messenger and the two other men with him, then moved toward the stairs leading to the mezzanine without hurry. Harry fell into step beside him, and the others followed.

Harry had expected Murphy to surprise the men from behind, but the sergeant calmly walked around in front of them, stopped and flipped back his coat to disclose his badge. He did not draw a gun, but his right hand rested against his belt.

They looked back at him blankly, both started furtive movements toward their armpits, but stopped them almost immediately. Some cold assurance in the homicide man’s eyes, a waiting look which edged almost on cruelty, caused them simultaneously to reject the invitation. Slowly they raised their hands level with their shoulders.

As the two men were led away in handcuffs, Harry scooped Helen into his arms, holding her around the shoulders and under the knees as you would a baby.

“We’d have been here sooner, darling,” he said. “But Sergeant Murphy wanted to bag Big John Gault, Gerald Crane and a cop named Joe Murphree first. And since he’s a night shift cop and this is on his own time, I had to humor him.”

Helen wound her arms about his neck. “Take me back to our own apartment,” she said simply.