Twenty Plus Two

Chapter 7

It was three hours to New York. The picture of Nikki Collinson was in his mind all the way. Her face was more vivid than that of Linda Foster. Yet Linda was available and Nikki was not. Not by at least fifty million dollars.

By the time he got to the hotel from the airport it was seven o’clock. He took a shower, put on a black mohair suit and had a sandwich in the hotel coffee shop. A taxicab took him to the huge building that housed the newspaper on 39th Street, just off Seventh Avenue. Consulting the directory, he rode up to the fourteenth floor. The mustiness of years of old newsprint assailed his nostrils as he entered an office.

An elderly man got up from a desk.

“I’d like to see a file of your old papers,” Alder said. “The early part of nineteen thirty-eight.”

The oldster nodded and went into one of the narrow passages that contained the file bins.

Alder took out a twenty-dollar bill and laid it on the counter. The man returned carrying three huge bound volumes.

“First three months of 1938,” he said, putting the volumes on the counter. “Anything special you want?”

Alder shook his head. The custodian picked up the twenty-dollar bill. “What’s this?”

“Somebody must have left it.”

The man fingered the bill, then folded it up. “Thank ye kindly.”

Alder began with January 1. He merely looked at the front pages of each edition, turning rapidly to each day’s paper. He went through the first volume quickly, started on February.

On February 16 there was a subhead across the front page. “Millionaire’s Daughter Kidnaped — Police Claim.”

He turned back three days of newspapers, went carefully through the entire issue. Nothing. The next paper he searched closely. In the Personal column he found the first mention, a carefully worded ad: “DORIS — PLEASE TELEPHONE. WE LOVE YOU. DAD.”

At this point they had obviously reported it to the police because they thought the girl had run away.

The next day, February 16, there was the headline and a compact story on page 12. It gave only the bare details. Doris Delaney had left Miss Tabitha Tubbs’s School for Girls on February 13. She had confided in her closest friend, Sally Weaver, that she was going to the malt shop a block away. She had not returned. It was not until late evening that the school learned of her disappearance. Her frightened chum, confronted by the headmistress, revealed that Doris had slipped out a number of times but had always returned within an hour or two. This occasion, Sally declared, was no different from any other. She was certain that Doris had no other objective than the forbidden trip to the malt shop. She had not changed her clothes — the school middy blouse and blue skirt. Yes, she had taken a coat because it was cold outside.

The parents, when notified of her disappearance, had come to the school. They had gone to the malt shop. They knew Doris there, but whether she had come in that afternoon was not certain. The proprietor, one Salvatore Genualdi, said no. His wife, Carmelita, thought she had. Under questioning she became uncertain. It could have been the day before, February 12. A school holiday. A number of the girls had come into the shop that day.

Mr. and Mrs. Delaney had asked the school to keep it out of the papers. A child’s escapade. She would show up, contrite and penitent, the next day.

Doris did not return. The next day the frightened parents inserted the newspaper ads. The school insisted that the girls be given only a modest allowance. Doris could not have had more than a dollar or two. If she had gone to the movies, eaten a meal or two away from the school, she would have been without funds.

After the second night away, the Delaneys called the police.

Doris was not a wayward girl. She was devoted to her parents. The reason she had been enrolled in the boarding school — when her home was only a few blocks away — was because her parents did not want to spoil their only child with too much attention. She went home for the weekends.

The police questioned Sally Weaver. Doris had not complained to her about her parents. She was attached to them. She did not hate the school, or its discipline. She was a straight A student in everything but algebra, and in that subject she had a strong B.

Boys?

Oh, she danced and perhaps flirted with those who came to the school cotillions. She occasionally dated a boy on weekends. The police refused to reveal the identity of the boy because of his age. The boy, however, was well known to the family and the dating had had the approval of the parents. The father of the boy was a business associate of Jonathan Delaney.

There was a two-column picture of Doris Delaney above the story. It showed a very pretty girl in a middy blouse. A light blonde girl, almost a towhead. A slight girl. She was partly turned when the picture had been snapped and Alder noted her immaturity — there was only a very slight curve of the youthful breast. The article called the girl sixteen, but a later reference said that she was born February 28, 1922, which would have made her fifteen actually at the time of her disappearance.

In the picture the girl seemed even younger than sixteen. A young sixteen, or perhaps only fourteen or fifteen. A child.

Alder turned to the February 17 issue of the newspaper. No subhead now, but a screaming 72-point streamer across the page: DORIS DELANEY BELIEVED KIDNAPED. The story was on page 1 and carried over to page 2.

No word had been received from Doris. The family had received no ransom notes, but the F.B.I. — under the Lindbergh Law — had entered the case. In spite of them, Jonathan Delaney told the newspaper’s ace crime reporter that he stood ready to deal with the kidnapers. The police had questioned attendants at the major railroad terminals, the airports. No girl answering Doris Delaney’s description had boarded any train or plane. Or been seen in bus depots. The picture of Doris Delaney, in two columns the day before, had been blown up to four columns. A headline over it read: HAVE YOU SEEN THIS GIRL?

On February 18, a subhead on page 1 read: POLICE BAFFLED BY MYSTERY OF DORIS DELANEY. The story was a rehash of the main facts, conceding that no clues had been unearthed. The efforts of the F.B.I. were not revealed. They rebuffed all questioners.

Alder turned the pages to the classified section. Under the Personal column, with an inch of white space below and above it, was the announcement:

As he studied the advertisement an idle thought struck Alder. He turned back the pages to Section 2, Page 4. In leafing quickly to the classified section an irregularity in the newspaper had imprinted itself in his mind. He found it now. A gap in the third column, a gap of one column and about three inches in depth. Below the gap was a short filler article, pertaining to a festival being held in Yorkville by a German Bund Verein. Above was a two-inch item. It had a lower-case, two-line heading.

Alder looked up from the newspaper. His eyes met those of the morgue attendant. “Somebody’s cut a piece out of this file copy.”

The custodian came over. “Beats all. They’ll steal ’em, mutilate ’em, do anything...” He turned the binder around. “Important?”

Alder took out a packet of bills, skimmed off another twenty and dropped it on the counter.

“Wait,” said the old man.

He went off to his files. He was gone a good three minutes, then returned with a bound volume, much more dusty than the one already on the counter.

“Let’s see, February 18, 1938.” He opened the volume and turned pages. Suddenly he exclaimed.

“Be damned!”

Alder leaned forward. Same date, same page, same gap. A neatly cut-out rectangle.

“Now I’ve seen everything,” said the old man. “Who’d cut out two pieces of the same newspaper?”

“Do you have a third file?”

“Two’s all. Oh, might be some old copies in the storeroom. There’s about fifty tons of newspapers there. We clean out a few tons, whenever we need more space, but seems to me I saw some papers there awhile ago around this date. Maybe a few years later.” He frowned. “Take a month of Sundays to search. Couldn’t do it myself because I’ve got to stay here in the room.” He looked at the paper’s date. “February 18, 1938. Bout the time of the Doris Delaney case.”

“You remember the case?” Alder asked.

“Remember it? I worked on it — used to be in the slot. Rewrite.”

“Then you know the man who covered it, Desmond Slocum?”

“’Course I know Des. A real two-bottle man. Drank himself outta the business. Not a newspaper in town’d give him a job.”

“But he’s still alive?”

“Was two-three months ago. Sneaked in here, put the bite on me.”

“Sneaked?”

“They won’t let him in the city room any more. Helluva way to treat a man. In his time Desmond was the best police reporter in the city, maybe in the country. He covered them all, the Lindbergh kidnaping, the Judge Crater case, Doris Delaney.”

“What’s your theory about Judge Crater?”

“He was a Tammany man, wasn’t he? I’d say he’s down at the bottom of the East River wearing a concrete overcoat.”

“And Doris Delaney, what’s your opinion about her?”

The former rewrite man rubbed his stubbled chin with the back of a thumb. “That one beats me. Just didn’t make sense. I’d a said she run off with a man. But that’s twenty years.”

“Twenty, plus two.”

“Yeah, twenty-two years. She run off with a man she’d have come back sometime. Especially when her pa died and left her five million. No man’s worth five million, not after all that time. Anyway, she couldda picked up the five million and still kept her man if she wanted. She didn’t.”

“You think she may have been murdered?”

“Your guess is as good as anybody’s. Come to think of it, I used to talk to Desmond about it. He had some theories, but dammed if I can remember them now. Everybody had a theory and you get my age, you just remember — but you can’t remember how you got it, or when. Maybe from reading the pieces I wrote myself. I dunno.”

“You said Desmond touched you for money only a short time ago. He happened to mention where he was living?”

“The Bowery, probably. No... no, Desmond never liked the Bowery. He used to do his drinking up on Third Avenue — around Yorkville, seems to me. Yeah, remember one time, I stopped in to get a glass of lager. He was there. Got into a fight with a customer and they threw him out. When he was top dog on the paper, nobody threw out Desmond Slocum. Nobody. He knew all the precinct boys, knew where the bodies was buried.”

“Thank you, old-timer,” Alder said.

“It’s a pleasure to talk with a gentleman,” declared the custodian as he creased the second twenty-dollar bill and stowed it away in a vest pocket.

On Seventh Avenue, Alder waited for a taxicab. Twenty minutes later, after bucking some heavy cross-town traffic, the cab deposited him at 86th Street and Third Avenue.