“If you wish,” she said, crushing out her cigarette and standing up. “But I assure you it’s nothing worthwhile.”
Mrs. Raglan led me deeper into the apartment and opened the door. “This is her room,” she said flatly. “Such as it is. Doesn’t look much like a normal teenager’s bedroom, does it?”
The room was starkly functional. A portable record player was in one corner, on the floor. The bed had no stuffed animals on it, the dresser-top was bare. A kneehole desk stood against one wall, and an old portable typewriter occupied the centre of it. Mrs. Raglan opened the drawers, disclosing a neat stack of typing paper, carbons, pencils and paper clips but nothing which looked remotely like a manuscript. “They’re probably in her locker at school. I think she took them in for Mr. Sorenson in the English Department to check over.”
I added Sorenson’s name to my notes.
“You’d hardly know she was a girl,” the woman said wryly. “She refused to learn how to sew. Said it didn’t interest her. Cooking was the same. She was always too busy with her art work — for which she Had no talent at all, and I told her so. For a while she wanted to be a dancer but she had absolutely no sense of rhythm.” There were many things Florence Raglan felt were wrong with her daughter and she seemed to enjoy listing them. “Lately it was writing, but the girl can’t even spell. When she took typing I tried to talk her into taking shorthand, too. Being a stenographer is a respectable career for a girl, but she said she wasn’t interested in other people’s words.”
“She must be a pretty good babysitter, though,” I ventured.
“She never sat for anyone but the Van Drimmelens. I was hoping that would bring out her feminine instincts, but I haven’t seen much improvement. She’s just too much like her father.”
“In what way?”
She gave me a long-suffering smile. “You know how Joe loves playing cops and robbers. He’s smart enough to get a better job, but being a detective has glamour. It feeds his ego. Do you know he even turned down a promotion last year because it would mean he’d have to grow up and start acting like a man?”
“I know.” It would have been unwise to tell her that was one of the reasons I admired Joe Raglan. I thanked her for her co-operation, borrowed a photo of Debbie and put it in my briefcase, and left her to resume her telephone vigil.
It was noon. I traced the eight-block route Debbie had travelled to her babysitting job and parked in front of the Van Drimmelens’. The neighbourhood seemed just as quiet as it had been last night.
Mrs. Van Drimmelen was home, feeding lunch to her two children. She was an attractive young woman, big-boned, with the clean, just-scrubbed look that owes more to diet than cosmetics. “I’m so upset over this,” she said. “You just don’t know. I’ve been so afraid something like this would happen.”
“You’ve had trouble with prowlers before?”
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “Never, as long as we’ve been here. We’ve been very fortunate in this neighbourhood, until last night. But... well, you know, Mr. Shaffer, a mother can’t help worrying about her children. Finding Debbie was such a godsend. Not very many girls her age are so capable or so dependable. She was always here fifteen to twenty minutes early, she never touched anything that didn’t belong to her. She was a real contrast to some of the girls we’ve had.”
“How did you happen to find Deborah?”
“My husband knows her father. Frank was telling Mr. Raglan about the troubles we’d been having with babysitters, and that very night Debbie called us. I’ve been so thankful she did — until this horrible thing happened.”
“Could you give me the names of your neighbours? I’d like to talk with them.”
“Of course.” She dictated a list of names while I wrote them down.
It was a short block, with only five houses counting the ones on the corners, so I worked my way from one end to the other. A Mrs. Carter Phillips, in the corner house, furnished the only piece of information which might conceivably be considered a clue.
“Nothing unusual ever happens in this neighbourhood,” she said. “About the most exciting thing yesterday — until the girl’s disappearance, I mean — was the old car that was parked behind our garage all day. I was a little angry about it, and I was going to call the police if it was still there today, but it isn’t.”
“A strange car?”
“I suppose I wouldn’t even have noticed it if it hadn’t been parked right where we put the trash barrels.”
“What kind of a car?”
“Oh, I don’t know. It was just an old black car like you see in junkyards. It was there all day, and it was still there when I went shopping last night, but it was gone by the time I got back.”
“What time was that?”
“Let’s see,” she said. “I was almost the last person to leave the supermarket, so it would have been a few minutes past ten when I returned. I told the police all about it and they said they didn’t think it was important.”
I drove thoughtfully back to the newspaper office.
Old Mayhew had done a good job for me. On my desk was a stack of clippings covering some thirty-seven cases in which Raglan’s testimony had helped send the accused to prison. I had about an hour or so left in which to produce twenty inches of copy for Pritch, so I set the tiles aside and began sifting my notes to find a starting place. Sometimes it’s like trying to pick up a jellyfish without knowing where the handle is. I had enough material, all I had to do now was put it together in the proper order. After about ten minutes I began building my lead paragraph I stared at it for a minute, then reached for the telephone.
Raglan was in his office. No, there were no last-minute developments.
“May I use the revenge theory yet, Joe?”
“I’d rather you didn’t until tomorrow,” Raglan said. “I don’t want to tip anyone off.”
“Anything to the old car in the alley?”
“What?”
“I’ve been busy, Joe. A Mrs. Phillips at 768 Barron said there was an old car parked behind her garage all day yesterday.”
“Oh, that. It was gone too early to have anything to do with this. If Debbie isn’t home by midnight I’ll have deputies and Boy Scouts combing the area for a body.”
“I hope you’re wrong.”
I broke the connection, dialed McKinley High School, and arranged for Mr. Sorenson of the English Department to call me immediately. It took him five minutes.
“Mr. Sorenson,” I said. “I’ve been told Deborah Raglan is interested in writing. Know anything about it?”
“Oh, yes, Mr. Shaffer,” Victor Sorenson replied. “I wasn’t in this morning, but I heard about your visit. Yes, Debbie showed quite a bit of promise. Her spelling was atrocious, but her stories were original and well-plotted, although of course there was very little depth to her characters.”
“Why do you say ‘of course’?”
“At fifteen? Would you expect her to have the insight you or I would have?”
“I wouldn’t expect the average fifteen-year-old to be writing mystery stories.”
“You have a point there,” he agreed. “Still, Debbie was not a very warm individual. Her mind was very clinical; her emotional development was wanting. She might have been capable, as she grew older, of attaining some degree of rapport with her fellow human beings, but I seriously doubt it.”
“She took you some stories, I believe. Do you still have them?”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Three days ago I had one but Debbie took it back to work on it some more.”
At three o’clock my story was in Stanton Pritchard’s hands. He read it over and passed it to Hendrix for a head. “What’s next, Shaffer?” he asked.