Twenty Plus Two

Chapter 2

Sam Harbin was probably no better and certainly no worse than fifty other police sergeants. He was forty, had been on the force for fourteen years and had been a Sergeant for eight. He was a big man, beginning to turn a bit fleshy. He would become a lieutenant in the near future and that was probably as high as he would go. He was not a good politician.

He said to Tom Alder: “She’s got eighteen hundred dollars in a savings account, less than five hundred in her checking. You could probably get five hundred for her personal belongings. Her entire estate won’t go three thousand. Not enough to interest you.”

Alder shrugged. “I spent three months on a case once and it earned me two hundred dollars. That’s the chance you take.”

“You don’t take them very often,” Harbin said. “You like the big ones. Estates worth a hundred thousand, a half million.”

“You get one of those in a lifetime,” said Alder. “It’s the ten, twenty thousand dollar ones that keep you going. The heirs of the big ones know they’re heirs. They’re waiting for the rich uncle or aunt to kick off. They’re in there yelling for their shares before the corpse is cold.”

“I’ve heard them,” agreed Sergeant Sam Harbin. “Everybody’s got a relative somewhere, some place... and they don’t mind giving a slice of their unexpected windfall to the man who brings them the good news. You’ve done all right as a ‘missing heirs’ finder, Tom, but this Julia Joliet one beats me. Even if you got the maximum — 25 per cent — you wouldn’t make out with enough to pay your expenses for a month. You live well in that bachelor house of yours.”

“You can’t win them all,” Alder said. “I wish you’d give me a note to the morgue. I’d like to take a look at the body.”

Harbin screwed up his mouth, studied Alder through narrowed eyes, then shrugged in surrender. “It’s a murder case, Alder. You dig up anything, I want your promise you’ll give it to me.”

“Promise.”

At the last moment, Harbin decided to go with Alder to the morgue. He was known there and the attendant took them into the cold room and pulled out the slab on which lay the sheet-covered remains of Julia Joliet.

She had been unattractive in life and in death she was positively ugly.

Alder looked at Harbin across the remains of the woman who had basked in the outer fringe of the movie stars’ dubious light. “How old would you say she was?”

“You guess,” said Harbin. “Her bank application, when she opened her checking account seven years ago, said thirty-nine.”

“That would make her forty-six.”

“If she told the truth. A lot of women stay thirty-nine for ten years. Sometimes they never get past it.”

“They don’t make themselves older very often.”

“Never.”

“A woman of thirty-one wouldn’t claim she was thirty-nine?”

“You’ve got something in mind?”

Alder shook his head. “No.”

“She look anything like you expected?”

“I never heard of Julia Joliet until today. I never saw her.”

“Then you don’t think she’s — Doris Delaney?”

“Doris Delaney?”

“Something got you interested in this case, Alder,” said Harbin. “I thought it might have been the mention of the Doris Delaney clippings.”

“It mean anything?”

“If there’s anyone in this country over the age of twelve who hasn’t heard of Doris Delaney he, she, or it, is blind, deaf, and dumb. Dorothy Arnold, Judge Crater, Doris Delaney — the three great mysteries of the twentieth century. Let’s see, one of the clippings in Julia’s apartment — it was from one of the papers of last month. The cause of it was the twenty-second anniversary of the disappearance of the wealthy young heiress, Doris Delaney.”

Harbin half-closed his eyes and began to speak in an oratorical voice. “Doris Delaney, the girl with everything to live for, walked out of Miss Tabitha Tubbs’s School for Girls, one afternoon and disappeared into the void that is New York City. Doris, aged sixteen, the only child of the wealthy Jonathan and Eleanora Delaney, told her closest friend and confidante that she was going to get an ice cream soda at the Malt Shoppe, a block from Miss Tubbs’s school. She never got to the store and her grief-stricken parents spent three-quarters of a million dollars during the next ten years searching for her. They hired the most expensive attorneys and private investigators. They advertised for her in virtually every newspaper in the land. They appealed to the police departments of every city in the country. The F.B.I. has never given up its search for the young heiress. They have a file in Washington, marked Delaney, Doris, Unsolved.” Harbin regarded Alder thoughtfully. “That about cover it?”

“You could add to it,” said Alder. “Any man that would try to find Doris Delaney, after twenty-two years, is a fool.”

“Are you a fool, Alder?”

Alder shook his head. Gently he raised the clammy sheet so that it covered the waxy features of the late Julia Joliet.