“Mitchell may have been ill that particular night, or he’d passed out and been dropped off at his home before they got into all that trouble, or he may have been out of town. I wouldn’t give up yet; I’d keep on with it like you are. At least it’s a positive line of approach; it’s better than nothing at all.”
A week later:
“How are you coming now, Wanger?”
“Do you see this look on my face? It’s that of a man about to jump off a bridge.”
“Fair enough! Only first clean up these Unknown-Woman Murders. Then I’ll drive you as far as the bridge approach myself and even pay the toll for you.”
“All kidding aside, chief, it’s ghastly. I’ve finished building the thing up since my last report. I’ve got it all complete now, not a thing left out. I even filled in the Mitchell blind spot. And now that I’m through — it has no meaning, it doesn’t help us at all! It has the same drawback to it that each of these murders in itself has had: there isn’t any motive there, from beginning to end, to incite to murder. Nothing they did was criminal enough, injurious enough to anyone, to precipitate a deferred-payment blood feud.”
“It may be present but you haven’t identified it yet. Let me hear your report anyway.”
“I tried to trace this Honeyweather, the fourth member, from the address he gave that night of their quadruple arraignment. And I’ve lost him entirely. Gone from the face of the earth. I was able to keep up with his movements for about a year afterward — and God knows he moved around plenty! Then he seems to have dropped from sight, vanished as completely as this woman herself has — only without the subsequent reappearances she makes!”
“What line was he in?”
“Seems to have been chronically unemployed. He sat in his room all day pecking away at a typewriter, from what his last landlady tells me. Then he left there and never showed up anywhere else.”
“Wait a minute, maybe I can give you a lift on that,” his superior said. “Unemployed — pecking away at a typewriter; maybe he was trying to be a writer. They sometimes change their names, don’t they? Have you got a pretty recognizable description?”
“Yes, fairly accurate.”
“Take it around to the various publishing houses, see if it fits anyone you know. Now, what about Mitchell? You said you cleared that up.”
“Yes. He was the bartender of a place they frequented at that time. They took him with them in the car more than once. Chiefly, I gather, because he chiseled liquor from his employer’s shelves and brought it along with him each time. So that although he was not a member of the card club itself, he was very much present when they went skylarking around afterward. Which at least keeps my whole line of investigation from collapsing, the way I was afraid it was going to; those Friday-night tears in the car are still the point at which all their lives intercross. But the main difficulty still remains: they don’t seem to have been guilty of anything that would warrant bringing this on, what we’re up against now.”
“Are you sure of that?”
“As far as all police records go, anywhere within the city limits during that period; and I’ve even covered the nearby outlying communities.”
“But don’t you realize that it was bound to be something that escaped police attention at the time, otherwise they wouldn’t still be at large today? It must have been a crime that was never attributed to them on the official records.”
“More than that,” Wanger said thoughtfully. “It just occurs to me — it may have been a crime that they didn’t even realize they committed themselves. Well, I’ve got a way of finding that out, too! I’m going to sift through the back files of every newspaper that came out, on the particular dates of their get-togethers. It must be in one of them somewhere, hidden, tucked away, not seeming to have anything to do with him. That’s what libraries are for. That’s where I’ll be from now on. The tougher it gets, the harder to lick I get!”
Wanger to Fingerprint Department, by telephone:
“Well, what the hell happened to that gun? D’ya lose it? I’m still waiting for a report.”
“What gun? You never sent us any gun, whadaya talking about?”
Incoherent squeak, as when a tenor voice goes suddenly falsetto. Then: “I never what? I sent you a gun to be checked over God knows how many weeks ago and not a peep out of you since! I’m still waiting! It wasn’t supposed to be a Christmas present, y’know! What kind of a place are you running there, anyway? It’s up to you guys to get it back to me, or didn’t you know that? You’re a fine bunch of crumbs!”
“Listen, thunder voice, we don’t needa be told our job by anyone. Who the hell do you think you are, the police commissioner? If y’da sent us a gun to be tested, we’da sent it back to ya! How we gonna get something back to you we never got from you in the first place?”
“Listen, don’t get tough with me, whoever you are. I got a gun coming to me and I want it!”
“Aw, look up your assignment and see if that’s where you left it!”
Clopp!
City home of a popular and successful writer, three weeks later:
“Mr. Holmes, there’s a gentleman in the outside room who insists on seeing you. He won’t be put off.”
“You know better than to do this! How long have you been working for me?”
“I told him you were dictating into the machine, but he says it simply cannot wait. He threatened, if I didn’t come in and inform you, to come in himself.”
“Where’s Sam? Call Sam and have him thrown out! If he gives you any trouble, call the police!”
“But, Mr. Holmes, he is the police. That’s why I thought I’d better come in and let you—”
“Police be damned! I suppose I parked too long by a fireplug or something! Right while I’m in the middle of the biggest scene in the whole book, too! D’you realize this whole interruption has gone into the machine, that I’ll have to start over again from the end of the last record? I’m sorry to do this. Miss Truslow, but you’ve broken one of my first and most inflexible rules that was impressed on you over and over when you were first taken on to help me with my work. No intrusion while I’m creating, not even if the building is burning down around me! I’m afraid I won’t need you any more after today. You finish up the typing that you have on hand, and Sam will give you your check when you’re ready to go home.
“Is this the man? Just what do you mean by forcing yourself in here and creating a disturbance like this? What is it you want to speak to me about?”
Wanger (softly): “Your life.”
Part Five
Holmes, the Last One
It seemed to me behind my chair there stood.
A spectre with a cold and cruel smile, lifeless and motionless.
I
The Woman