The acrid smell was gunpowder. Nancy was dead on the dance floor. Someone had shot her in the head. The furniture was ruined.
Wilson looked for the telephone. The gunpowder smelled recent. He noticed there were nuts on the dark wood of the dance floor. He took a closer look. There were a handful of them. Roasted.
Wilson found the telephone. He hadn’t even put his hand to it when he heard the sirens. He figured the neighbors must have heard the gunshot. Maybe the mayor’s sister had put in the call?
Within a minute, Nancy’s living room took on the appearance of a police convention. Uniformed officers were everywhere. They were taking bets on the type of gun used. They were huddled about in groups picking over last night’s fights. They were using the dirt at the base of the palm as an ashtray. Two were playing a duet of “Chopsticks” on the grand.
Lieutenant Harden, a sour-faced dump truck of a man in possession of few facial features and dressed in a black overcoat, knew Wilson. Knew him and hated him. And when he walked in and laid eyes on him, he wished the first officers who had arrived on the scene had shot him dead.
Harden hated reporters, especially short ones who poked their noses where they shouldn’t ought to.
“How’s the wife, Harden?” Wilson inquired as the dump truck approached.
“You’re under arrest,” Harden grunted at Wilson.
“Why?”
“Why not? There’s a dead girl lying on the floor and you have no alibi.”
“You haven’t even asked for an alibi.”
“Do you have one?”
Wilson shook his head. “How about a motive? I don’t have one of those, either.”
“Book him,” Harden grunted at the nearest uniform who wasn’t preoccupied.
Wilson protested, but he was firmly escorted from the building and out to a waiting patrol car.
Before Wilson got in, he remembered he had forgotten his hat. He excused himself to retrieve it.
The officer waited.
Wilson went out the back, around the pool, and over the wall. The last time Wilson had ever worn a hat had been during the war.
Sitting in a police cell would not be working — it would be sitting. Wilson hadn’t shot Nancy, so he saw no reason for loafing on the job.
The bar was in a back street off an alley. The bar had two claims to fame: the Eats, Shoots, and Leaves Murder, and the fact that Rudolph Valentino drank there once.
Wilson was an instinctive reporter, and his instincts told him if you want to know the story, start at the beginning. The bar was the beginning of this story. Everything began there, so there he went.
The place was empty. The jukebox still had the bullet hole in it. Behind the bar was a young redhead with her hair done up in a bun. She was smoking a cigarette and reading Time magazine — Lucy was on the cover.
“Is the owner about?” Wilson asked.
“Mr. Rutherford is on holiday,” the woman replied, glancing over the top of the magazine.
“Rutherford?” Wilson asked. “I thought the owner’s name was Merkon.”
“Mr. Rutherford became the owner after the death of Mr. Merkon.”
“Merkon died?”
The redhead nodded.
“Let me confirm, Merkon was the owner here when the Eats, Shoots, and Leaves Murder took place?”
The redhead nodded again.
Wilson frowned.
“Mr. Merkon was shot too,” she added. “Only they didn’t give it a fancy name.”
“Merkon was shot?”
The woman behind the bar nodded. “Six months ago. Five bullets. His body was found by the city dump.”
Wilson ordered a whiskey. He climbed up onto a barstool and got to know the redhead better.
The woman’s name was Sophie. She had been working at the bar for eight months. She knew all about the Eats, Shoots, and Leaves Murder.
Merkon had told her all about it. Merkon had told everyone all about it. But, it was what he hadn’t been telling everyone about the murder that really fascinated the redhead.
“He called it his retirement fund,” Sophie reported. “He showed it to me. He kept it hidden. It was a little candy box. It had a tartan design to it, only what was inside probably wasn’t candy, and probably not Scottish.”
“What was inside?” Wilson asked.
“He never told me. But it had something to do with that murder, and he said it was going to make him a rich man.”
“Where’s the box now?”
Sophie shrugged her shoulders. “I’ve looked for it, but I’ve never found it.”
Wilson would have left the matter there, finished his drink and gone on his way, were it not for Sophie’s next remark: “You know, there was a guy in here just last week asking the same questions as you.”
“What guy?”
“A middle-aged guy. He smoked cheroots. I don’t know I would trust him if I had to. I told him about the candy box, too. He took a great interest in it.”
Wilson stared at the redhead. She had blue eyes. Sophie was a nice name for a redhead with blue eyes. Wilson could sit in that bar a whole long time, he imagined.
“Did I say something?” Sophie asked. She noticed a sparkle in the short man’s eyes.
Right around then, a police cruiser pulled up outside the bar. Within seconds, two thickset police officers came into the bar with their guns drawn.
Wilson went out the back door — it was next to the jukebox. He slipped through the doorway like a rabbit down a hole. A hail of gunfire went after him. Half of the bullets went into the jukebox, and the other half went through the doorway and narrowly missed him. One didn’t — it nicked his cheek.
So, Merkon had been shot dead — six months ago. Merkon’s passing had passed Wilson by unnoticed, so he headed to the morgue to catch up.
The morgue was in the basement of the City Daily Herald. Every issue the newspaper had ever printed was archived there, along with every report file, photograph, mimeograph, memorandum, and shopping list anyone in the building had ever written, filed, or sneezed upon.
Wilson had to wait until well after dark before he went in, and only then entering through a seldom-used back door. If the police had followed him to the bar with such apparent ease, then they’d have certainly staked out his office up on the fourth floor.
Once downstairs in the morgue, Wilson waded his way through the dusty back editions, rolling back the days about six months.
It was dark and damp down in the basement. The morgue was really no better than a rat-infested warren of corridors and shelves, lit by two five-watt light bulbs. The word “dank” had been coined there.
Merkon’s death barely got more than a paragraph and was buried toward the back of a late edition under a story about combine harvesters.
Wilson read about Merkon by the light of his cigarette lighter. It was pithy: Merkon was a man, he was found dead at the dump, and police had no leads in the investigation.
Wilson went for the back files — maybe there was more in the reporter’s notes. But there was no file on Merkon. Nary a slip of paper.
Wilson dug deeper. There weren’t any files on Merkon’s bar, and none for the shooting there, either. The reporter’s notes on that alone surely would have been an inch thick — Wilson knew this, he wrote much of it.
And there were no files whatsoever on Nancy Stillwater. Not even confetti.
Wilson lit a cigarette and pondered. Files were what a news-paper was built on. Documentation was the lifeblood of journalism.
Wilson could hear footsteps — slow, deliberate steps. They drew near.
“What are you doing?” asked a voice in the darkness. The voice had an English accent.