The Second Richard Deming Mystery MEGAPACK®

by Deming, Richard

  “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.”

  Th
e 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.”