A. Fair - Owls Don't Blink

“That the standard line you hand all the customers?”

She looked at me frankly and said, “Sure. What the hell did you think? That I want to marry you? If you’re a detective, be your age.”

“Thanks,” I told her. “You may see me again at that. In the meantime, I’m off.”

“Where?”

“Leg work. Lots of leg work. Chores. Damn details. I hate them, but you have to do them.”

She said, “I guess that’s life. For you and me and the other guy.”

“That the way it is with you?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

She made a little gesture and said, “Because I was a damn fool. I have to make a living. I’ve got a kid.”

I said, “On second thought, I guess the information was worth ten dollars to the agency. Here’s the other five.”

“No kidding, it’s on an expense account?”

“On an expense account — and my boss is a big-hearted egg.”

Her hand joined mine. “Gosh, aren’t you lucky — a boss like that!” The five-dollar bill slipped over into her palm. She walked with me as far as the door. “I like you,” she said. “I wish you really would come back.”

I nodded.

She said, “I tell all the customers that, but this time I happen to mean it.”

I patted her shoulder and went on out. She stood in the door, watching me down the street. I caught a taxi-cab at the corner and drove out to the airport.

It was just the old routine leg work of a complete check-up, but something you can’t overlook if you want to be a good detective.

The passenger lists showed that Emory G. Hale had been a passenger on the 10:30 plane for New York City, that he’d returned on the plane, arriving at 8:30 that morning. I even checked to make sure he’d actually traveled on the plane.

The records showed that he had.

I took a cab back to the hotel. I was past due for a lot of shut-eye.

It was past noon when I went to Hale’s apartment. He was out. I had a combined breakfast and lunch at the Bourbon House and tried Hale again.

No dice.

I went down St. Charles Avenue to the apartment house where Roberta had lived and studied the place as carefully as I could while walking by. Then I went back to the hotel and wrote out a typewritten report for the office files, being careful to list all my expenses.

I went back to the apartment at about four. Hale was in.

He was, moreover, in a very jovial mood.

“Come right in, Lam. Come in and sit down. Well, young man, I think I did you a little good. I drummed up another customer for you.”

“That right?”

“Yes. A man was here asking about you. I gave you a very good recommendation, very good indeed.”

“Thanks.”

We sat looking at each other for a while; then he said, “It’s very interesting. I’ve been searching the apartment.”

“For what?”

“For something that might give us some clue.”

“She hasn’t lived here for three years.”

“I know, but I was just looking around on the off chance. You can’t tell when something might be found — letters or something.”

“That’s right.”

“I’ve already found quite an assortment of things, letters that had worked under the papers that were placed on the bottom of the desk drawers, and there in the writing desk a whole lot of correspondence had dropped down in back of the drawer. I haven’t got it all out yet. I put the drawer back when I heard your steps on the stairs. I didn’t know just who it was that was coming.”

He walked over to the desk and pulled out the top drawer.

“Don’t happen to have a pocket flashlight, do you?” he asked.

“No.”

He said, “I’ve been looking down here with a match, but it’s rather dangerous. An end may drop off the match, and set the whole thing afire.”

He struck a match, shielded the flame with his hand for a moment, then pushed his arm down inside the place where the drawer had been. “Take a look down there,” he said.

Back down in the lower part of the desk I could see a litter of papers; then the match flickered out.

“Can’t we get at them by taking the lower drawers out?” I asked.

“No. I’ve tried that. There’s a partition back of the lower drawers. See?”

He pulled out one of the lower drawers. A solid partition was behind it. It left a space some six or eight inches between the back of the drawer and the back of the desk.

Hale said, “You see how it is. The upper drawer was made very deep so it would hold the desk blotter. The lower drawers aren’t as deep by some eight inches. There was that much dead space in the desk.”

I was curious now. “Not one chance in a hundred any of those papers concern the girl we want, but seeing we’ve gone this far, we may as well get them out.”

“How?”

“We’ll take everything out of the desk and stand the thing on its head.”

Hale didn’t say a word, started pulling the drawers out, and then removing things from the pigeonholes in the top of the desk, a bottle of ink, some pens, blotter, a couple of boxes of matches, and a few minor odds and ends which had accumulated as a hold-over from past tenants.

“Ready?” he demanded. I nodded.

We each took hold of an end of the desk and moved it out from the wall.

Hale said, “I may as well confess to you. Lam, that I’m something of a detective myself. I’m interested in human nature, and nothing gives me quite as much pleasure as to be able to pry into the unexpected corners of the human mind. I like to read old correspondence. Came on a trunk full of letters at one time in connection with cleaning up an estate. Most interesting thing I’ve ever seen. Now, just tilt it down on that side. There we are. Easy now. Well, this trunk full of letters belonged to a woman who died at the age of seventy-eight. She’d saved every letter she’d ever received. Letters in there she’d received during her childhood, letters during the time she was being courted. Most interesting collection I’ve ever seen. And they weren’t the repressed sort of letters that you’d expect either. Some of them were dynamite. Now, let’s turn the thing right on over. Say, there’s something heavy in there.”

There was indeed something heavy in the desk. It slid down the back of the desk, hit against the inverted top with a thud, and then lodged there. We’d have to find some other way.

“Pick the desk up and shake it,” I said. “Hold it down this way.”

The desk was heavy. It took us a minute to get it elevated at just the right angle. When we had it sloped right, the heavy object thudded out to the floor. After that, I could hear the rustle of papers sliding out and dropping to the carpet. We couldn’t see what they were while we were holding the desk.

“Give it a shake,” I suggested.

We shook the desk. Hale took his big palm and pounded on the back. “I guess that’s all.”

We righted the desk and looked down at the pile of stuff on the floor. There were old letters, yellowed newspaper clippings, and the heavy object.

Hale and I stood staring at that heavy object.

It was a .38 caliber revolver.

I picked it up and looked at it. Four chambers of the cylinder were loaded. Two of them held exploded cartridges. There were some spots of rust on the gun, but, for the most part, it was in good condition.

Hale said, “Someone must have put that gun in the desk drawer on top of some papers, then as he opened the drawer hurriedly the gun dropped down behind, and—”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Let’s take a look at the way that drawer fits.”

I fitted the drawer into the groove and looked at the space behind it.

“No dice,” I told him. “That gun couldn’t have dropped down behind there accidentally. The space is too small. That gun must have been deliberately dropped down there after someone had taken the drawer out. In other words, that was used, not as a place of storage but as a place of concealment.”