“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.