The Second Richard Deming Mystery MEGAPACK® Page 8

  “Where’s this rooming house where she stayed before you got married?” Murphree asked.

  The rooming house was at Second and Clark. Harry experienced a sinking feeling when the woman who came to the door was not Mrs. Swovboda, who had been landlady when Helen moved out.

  He inquired tentatively, “Is Mrs. Swovboda in?”

  The woman, a plump, matronly person of middle age, said. “Mrs. Swovboda moved to Florida a week ago, after I bought her out.”

  Sergeant Murphree showed his badge. “You run this place now, lady?”

  “Yes, sir, Mrs. Johansen is the name, Sergeant.”

  “You got a register of former guests?”

  “Yes, sir. Come in please, and I’ll get it.” She showed them into the same plain but comfortably furnished living room where Harry had sat nearly a month ago when he was arranging a room for Helen. From the top drawer of an old-fashioned desk she took the black loose-leafed notebook in which Harry had entered Helen’s name, and in which behind the entry Mrs. Swovboda had written the date and $10.00 paid.

  Watching over the sergeant’s shoulder as the man slowly turned the pages, Harry was not surprised to learn the entry was no longer there.

  Handing the notebook back to Mrs. Johansen, the detective asked without much interest, “Any of your roomers in?”

  Before the woman could reply, Harry said in a tired voice, “None of them knew her. Hers was the side room with the separate entrance. When she moved out I remember her remarking that in the two weeks she was here, she never even glimpsed any of the other tenants.”

  Without looking at Harry, the detective moved toward the door. Just before passing through it, he thanked the landlady rather gruffly, glanced once at Harry in a set-jawed manner and looked away again.

  Outside, he climbed behind the wheel of the convertible, waited until Harry was next to him, and then said grimly, “We’ll make one more check.”

  Driving a block and a half along Clark, he stopped in front of Harry’s old rooming house. With no hope whatever Harry followed him up the front steps.

  He was so surprised when the door was opened by his old landlady, Mrs. Weston, he very nearly grabbed the woman and kissed her. Under ordinary circumstances such a thought would have nauseated him, for not only had he vaguely disliked Mrs. Weston when he roomed at her house, she was sixty, fat and had a mustache. At the moment, however, she looked beautiful to Harry, for at last he could show Sergeant Joe Murphree someone who had actually met Helen and could vouch for her existence.

  The woman frowned at Harry and asked, “What’s the matter? Lose your key?”

  The question took him aback, but he tabled it for the moment in order to introduce Sergeant Murphree. “Tell the sergeant about Helen, Mrs. Weston,” he said eagerly. “You remember. The girl I brought here once and told you I was going to marry.”

  “Helen?” the woman asked in a doubtful tone. “Did you bring a Helen here?” To the sergeant she said, “I got twelve young men, and they’re always bringing their girls around for me to meet. Makes it hard to remember.”

  “Yeah,” the bull-necked detective said disgustedly. “This guy lived here until a week ago, did he?”

  Mrs. Weston looked surprised. “Until a week ago? He still does.”

  Harry gazed at her with his mouth open. Sergeant Murphree glared at him, then asked Mrs. Weston in a stiff voice, “Mind if I look around his room for a minute?”

  The landlady looked him over doubtfully, frowned at Harry and then apparently decided to cooperate with the police without asking questions. She led them up a flight of stairs to Harry’s old room. Harry gazed at the blank door in dread, almost knowing in advance what was on the other side.

  “Gimme that key you claimed was to the apartment,” Sergeant Murphree said, holding out his hand.

  Numbly, Harry handed it over. It slipped into the lock easily, and when the sergeant turned it, the door opened. Sergeant Murphree stepped aside, laid his hand on Harry’s shoulder and gently propelled him into the room first.

  Harry felt no shock at what he saw, for by now his nerves were anesthetized to shock. A numbness almost approaching indifference had replaced his emotions, and he felt nothing whatever when he saw his own books on the table by the window, his alarm clock and table model radio on the bedside stand, and through the open door of the closet a rack containing his own neckties.

  The thought flickered across his mind that somehow he had slipped back in time. In science-fiction stories he had read of “time faults” through which a person could accidently slip and find himself suddenly either in the future or the past. He had never heard of such a thing actually happening, and had never regarded time faults as anything but the stuff of fantasy, but how else could he explain what had happened? Perhaps Helen was still safe in Des Moines and they were not even married yet.”

  He turned to look into Sergeant Murphree’s face, finding nothing there but the resigned bitterness of a cop who is long inured to spending much of his time chasing wild geese.

  He asked eagerly, “What’s the date today?”

  The expression on the sergeant’s face caused his eagerness to die. The man thinks I’m mad, he thought.

  At the same time a matter occurred to him which shattered the time fault theory to dust. Dale Thompson had died that morning, which automatically proved he had not slipped back a few weeks in time, for once dead, the man could hardly come alive again weeks later and hire Helen as his secretary.

  I am mad, he thought with an odd sense of relief. I haven’t lost Helen because I never had her. I imagined her arrival in Wright City, the apartment, our marriage, everything.

  With the detached sense of standing to one side and hearing another person speak, he heard himself saying, “I guess it was all a mistake, Sergeant. Sorry to have troubled you.”

  The detective’s face had flushed a dark red. He growled, “What you need is a little psychiatric treatment, Bub. You bring another wild story to Headquarters and you’ll find yourself in the observation ward at City Hospital!”

  He strode out of the room and clumped down the stairs without even saying good-by to Mrs. Weston. The landlady regarded Harry strangely for a moment.

  “What’s this all about, Mr. Nolan?” she asked finally. “You in some kind of trouble with the police?”

  Harry shook his head at her.

  “Well, I wouldn’t want a roomer in trouble with the police,” she said. “I’ll have to ask for your room if there’s any more of this kind of goings on.”

  Harry merely gave her a trancelike nod. After the woman left, closing the door behind her, he stood in the center of the room for a long time without moving.

  Finally, for want of anything else to do, he undressed and went to bed.

  Though he almost immediately fell into an exhausted sleep, Harry did not spend a restful night. A recurrent nightmare of chasing Helen along labyrinthine corridors while Sergeant Joe Murphree held him back by the coat tails and Mrs. Weston stood on the sidelines laughing uproariously, awoke him time after time.

  His periods of wakefulness were more restful than what sleep he got, for then he could lie still with a deliberately blanked mind and think of nothing. Sleep was merely a half-conscious coma in which agonized fears rose, from his subconscious to torment him.

  At seven in the morning he abruptly awoke from a dream in which Helen, for the hundredth time, had just disappeared down a dim side corridor. Physically he was as exhausted as when he had fallen into bed, but he was startled to find his mental processes suddenly clear.

  Last night he had gone to bed convinced he was mad, that his marriage to Helen, their week together in the apartment had been figments of a diseased imagination. This morning he knew with stark clarity he was as sane as any man ever was. And with equal clarity he knew that whate
ver persons or whatever supernatural forces, had created this incredible situation, Helen either was dead or in horrible danger.

  While the thought caused a recurrence of all the terrors the numb conviction he was mad had deadened, it also brought relief of another sort. Aside from the natural relief of knowing he was not mentally diseased, for the first time, he faced squarely the problem of Helen’s danger and found the courage to fight it.

  He started the fight by mentally going over everything that had happened from the moment his key refused to open the apartment door until his trancelike entry into the room where he now lay. Every action of his own, every word spoken by others, he reviewed in detail in an attempt to find some small point he could grip as a start toward an explanation.

  He found two, but they floated into his mind so unobtrusively, it was some moments before he realized their significance. But when he finally did, he leaped from bed in excitement.

  The first detail was small, and by itself probably would have escaped his attention.

  It consisted merely of his recollection that Mrs. Johansen, the new landlady at the rooming house where Helen had stayed, had addressed the detective as “Sergeant,” although he had offered no introduction other than his badge. How had she known his rank, when she gave no indication that she had ever seen him before?

  It was the second detail which filled him with overwhelming excitement. From Mrs. Johansen’s Sergeant Joe Murphree had driven straight to Mrs. Weston’s.

  But he had not asked the address, and at no point during the supposed investigation had Harry given it to him.

  * * * *

  Sergeant Don Murphy was not pleased to see Harry.

  “I start work at four p.m.,” he said inhospitably. “You’ll find cops on duty at Headquarters.”

  “Just any cop won’t do,” Harry told him. “I thought maybe you’d be interested in knowing your police department is crooked.”

  The thin detective’s expression did not change and his body continued to bar the door of his small frame cottage. But his voice lost its inhospitable edge.

  Without inflection he asked, “You just find that out? How long you been in Wright City?”

  Harry ran his eyes over the front of the cheap but tidy cottage, glanced at the neatly trimmed lawn, which was just large enough to accommodate a single tree, and finally settled on a ten-year-old sedan at the curb. “Your car..?” he asked.

  Sergeant Murphy stared at him a moment. “Yeah.”

  “Sergeant Joe Murphree drives a Mercury convertible. Brand new.”

  “Yeah,” Murphy repeated.

  “I’ll bet he lives in a bigger home than this, too.”

  The thin man regarded him expressionlessly. Then he silently pushed the screen door wide.

  Though inexpensively furnished, the living room was as neat and attractive as the outside of the house. Just as Harry seated himself in a worn but comfortable armchair, a boy of about two streaked into the room at a tottering run, a sugar cookie firmly grasped in one pudgy hand.

  Behind him rushed a plump, attractive woman clad in a house dress. Before she could reach the youngster, Murphy scooped him up and said, “Here! Who told you you could have cookies before breakfast?” The simple act of picking up the child instantly transformed the thin detective from an emotionless cop to an average husband and father. The habitual chilliness of his expression was replaced by a mock sternness recognizable even to the child as a cover for extreme gentleness. With a happy giggle the youngster allowed his father to salvage the cookie and hand it to his mother.”

  “Donnie always grabs a cookie before meals,” Murphy explained to Harry. “It’s a game. Never eats it, but likes the sport of being chased.”

  With unconcealed pride he introduced his wife as Anne.

  “How do you do?” Mrs. Murphy said. “You’ll have to excuse me while I get some breakfast into this young man.”

  Preoccupied with his own problem, it had not occurred to Harry until then that eight o’clock on Saturday morning was rather an early hour for a visit. Confused, he began to apologize for interrupting breakfast.

  “We’re finished,” Anne Murphy said. “We let Donnie sleep till eight because we’ve never been able to get him to take an afternoon nap. You aren’t disturbing us at all.”

  As soon as she disappeared with the boy, the thin detective became all policeman again. In a cold voice he asked, “Now what’s all this about crooked cops?”

  Harry said, “You know about my wife disappearing. Last night, Sergeant Murphree took me on what was supposed to be an investigation, but which I think actually was a deliberate demonstration to me that my case was hopeless. I believe the design was either to convince me I was mad, or frighten me into the realization that if I continued to insist I had a wife and lived at Carlton Avenue, I would end up in an observation ward, and possibly be committed as insane.”

  “You mean you think Murphree had something to do with your wife’s disappearance?”

  “I’m sure he was a definite part of the cover-up.” He told of Mrs. Johansen’s inadvertent reference to Murphree as “Sergeant,” and of the bull-necked detective driving straight to Harry’s old rooming house without asking the address.

  “He’s not only a crook, but a cheap chiseler,” Harry concluded. “Even while he was deliberately making a sucker out of me, he took time out to work me for a two-and-a-half-dollar meal in an expensive restaurant.”

  With no expression on his face to indicate his thoughts, Sergeant Murphy turned Harry’s story over in his mind. At last he said, “All right, Joe Murphree is a crooked cop. But why come to me instead of taking your complaint to Headquarters?”

  “Maybe at Headquarters I’d run into more crooked cops. I been thinking it over, and it seems funny the desk sergeant referred me to Murphree by name instead of just sending me to the detective bureau. Maybe they expected my visit and were all primed.”

  “Maybe I’m crooked too,” the detective said dryly.

  Harry shook his head. “Last evening I could tell you hated Joe Murphree’s guts. When I became convinced Murphree was a crooked cop, it occurred to me maybe you hated him because you’re an honest one.”

  The thin detective emitted a non-committal grunt. “And what do you think I can do?”

  “Maybe nothing,” Harry said. “But you’re a trained investigator and I imagine you know Wright City pretty well. I’m not even an amateur investigator and I’m practically a stranger in the city. Alone, I wouldn’t even know where to start, but with your help I might at least have a chance.”

  “Look, Nolan,” Murphy said bluntly. “This isn’t even a Homicide case. At least not yet. I put in more time than I get paid for now. Why should I stick my neck out off-duty for a guy I only met yesterday?”

  Harry said slowly, “No reason—except I think you’re an honest cop.”

  The detective glanced at him sharply. “What’s that got to do with it? I can name you as many honest cops on the force as crooked ones.”

  Harry said evenly, “Doesn’t an honest cop have certain responsibilities that aren’t listed in regulations? Sort of moral responsibilities? Me, I was raised to obey the law and respect the law, but never to be afraid of it. Probably most American kids grow up with that attitude. But when you find yourself in a jam and go to the police for help, only to discover the police are working with the criminals who caused your jam, it shakes your faith in the whole law-enforcement system. I’m not speaking as an irate taxpayer, but merely as a citizen who has always believed in the American system of government. What would happen to our society if all our law-abiding citizens lost faith in our system of law enforcement?”

  “Anarchy, probably,” Murphy said laconically. “But even honest detective sergeants can’t buck City Hall. And Joe Murphree has the backing of City Hall.�
��

  Harry was silent for a moment. “I see,” he said finally. “I suppose it is asking a lot, since I imagine an honest cop in this town has to move pretty carefully if he wants to hold his job. Naturally you have to consider your wife and kid’s security.” Rising from his chair and walking to the door, Harry turned and said without any particular emphasis, “I suppose Helen isn’t the first woman in Wright City who ever vanished. Or the last. It could happen in any family.”

  Involuntarily, the detective glanced toward the door through which his wife had disappeared with his son. Then his chill face relaxed in a wry smile.

  “Come on back and sit down,” he said wearily.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Proof of a Wife

  Sergeant Don Murphy sighed. “Before you get your hopes up, I want you to understand a few things. You know much about Wright City?”

  Harry shook his head. “I’ve only been here six weeks.”

  “Well, it’s a wide-open town, if you know what that means.”

  “You mean gambling and such stuff? I know that much, because you can’t walk into a tavern, drug store or filling station without stumbling over a one-armed bandit. And I’ve heard the fellows at work talk about gambling houses, though I’ve never been to one. You mean it’s wide open—like Reno and Las Vegas?”

  “I mean wide open like Wright City. In Reno and Las Vegas gambling is legal. Here it couldn’t operate without a powerful and crooked city administration behind it. And gambling is only one of the things that make it a wide open town. We’ve got ninety-four fleabag hotels where anything goes, and at least two dozen retail outlets for marijuana and heroin. The city is rotten with graft from the mayor on down, with the sole exception of the Homicide Squad. Lieutenant George Blair is our boss, and there hasn’t yet been enough money minted to fix him. Otherwise the whole city is crooked. The mayor himself is only a figurehead for Big John Gault, who runs the whole shebang.”