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.”
The 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.